


Dreamers Dance

by indiefic



Category: The Bone Season - Samantha Shannon
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-27
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-15 12:25:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3447125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indiefic/pseuds/indiefic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS THROUGH THE MIME ORDER.  AU set about a year before the events of The Bone Season.  It’s taken decades, but the Warden of the Mesarthim has finally found the traitor who cost him his freedom and status among the Rephaim.  However, Warden’s attempt to strike at the cold heart of his betrayer has consequences that no seer could scry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Dreamer's Dance

**Author's Note:**

> AU that spins off a year or so before the events of The Bone Season begin. 
> 
> HUGE SPOILERS FOR EVERYTHING THROUGH THE END OF THE MIME ORDER. I AM NOT KIDDING. SPOILERS.

It took years to find him, the coward who traded all the lives in Sheol I for his own freedom.  Arcturus had sworn, as his former betrothed flayed his physical form, that he would have his revenge.  He would avenge every last Ranthen who died under the Sargas tyranny.  He would avenge the humans who were sacrificed so callously by one of their own.

 

It appeared that Jaxon Hall had learned well while kissing the feet of Nashira Sargas.  The White Binder had the potential to actually beat the bitch at her own game.  As voraciously as Nashira’s bone-grubbers hunted voyants, Jaxon Hall bound them under the dubious protection of his blackened wings.  Hall had written the pamphlet, of that, Arcturus was certain.   _On the Merits of Unnaturalness_ striated the human voyant population more effectively than decades of Scion’s persecution.  Hall learned from Nashira how to separate the amaranth from the chaff, how to hold the precious close and achieve dominion on the backs of the forgotten.

 

Jaxon Hall’s betrayal cost Arcturus dearly.  It cost him everything.  The Warden of the Mesarthim was a blood-traitor, hunted by the Sargas.  He was forced to hide from his fellow Rephaim, to hide from Scion.  He was forced to beg amaranth from the few Ranthen who survived the culling.  He was denied the Netherworld, forever.  He was denied _her_.

 

Arcturus had few advantages over Hall, but the one thing he did have was time.  He watched Jaxon Hall for years, watched him manipulate and maneuver.  He watched him coddle and coerce.  He watched him kill.  He saw Hall bring new voyants into his fold, shining them up like new jewels.  Only to then treat them like slaves, teaching them to take pride in the quality of their shackles.  Arcturus watched Hall parade his Seals right under the nose of Scion, unconcerned with the very mortal danger they faced.  

 

Jaxon Hall was a man without a soul.  There was no moral center to his being.  But in some ways, that made it so much easier.  Like Nashira Sargas, Jaxon Hall betrayed himself in the things he coveted, in the _people_ he coveted.  As amused as Hall was with his new Unreadable, and the Unreadable’s venomous sibling, there was one Seal whom Hall craved above the rest.  His Pale Dreamer.  

 

Arcturus understood why Hall was so enthralled.  Jaxon Hall had a storied history of taking his captor’s blunt methods and honing them to razor precision.  Nashira Sargas had always wanted, and failed to find, a dreamwalker to subjugate.  Hall beat Nashira at her own game, and he had no intention of letting his precious jewel fall into other hands.  But Hall’s little dreamer was reckless, far more reckless than Hall realized.  The Pale Dreamer was so very young.  Tonight she was in pain.  And Hall was oblivious.

 

It wasn’t in Arcturus’s nature to be vindictive, but in this case, he would make an exception.  Just for Jaxon Hall.  Besides, Arcturus was a predator by nature.  And Hall’s little dreamer would be such sweet prey.

 

* * *

 

Paige tottered out of the buck cab, unsteady in the ridiculous shoes.  She ignored how the biting cold cut through the lace dress.  It would be warm enough inside, though she wasn’t sure anything could ever melt the ice in the pit of her stomach.  The bouncer let her in, eyeing her as she passed.  

 

The flash house was dark and packed with sweating, straining bodies.  Most of them were amaurotic, but there was the occasional voyant, like the bartender who narrowed his eyes as she asked for real wine.  The idea of dancing her cares away still played heavy on her mind.  She wasn’t sure it was possible.  She had no idea how to dance.  But she would try.  Anything had to be better than this misery.

 

She downed the wine quickly and tipped her head for another.  She didn’t particularly like alcohol, but tonight she would make an exception.  Nick was in love.  He just wasn’t in love _with her_.  And right now, she would do anything to bury that pain and humiliation.  She would do anything to be seen.  For everything that she was.

 

Paige was poised to buy another round when a hand stilled her arm.  “Hey,” he said, with a gleaming white smile.  “Can I get this one?”

 

He was amaurotic, attractive and he had money.  Paige nodded.  They had a drink together, conversing unevenly over the deafening music.  His name was Rueben.  He was self-assured and unfettered in ways Paige would never be.  

 

Their glasses were empty, and Paige’s heart felt lighter.  She let him lead her onto the dance floor.  They were surrounded by writhing throngs of amaurotic college students looking for adventure in a rough part of the Citadel.

 

The amaurotic boy pulled her close, urging her hips to his as they swayed to the driving beat of the music.  In heels, she was nearly two inches taller than him, but that made no difference.  The alcohol made everything hazy and she didn’t even try to concentrate on what he was saying.  

 

This beautiful, sun kissed boy didn’t know anything about the inner workings of the mime syndicate.  He didn’t have to watch out for NVD patrols or spend hours in front of the mirror perfecting his accent.  He was free.  And he wanted her for no other reason than that she was willing.  He didn’t know or care that she was a mollisher or a dreamwalker.  He didn’t owe her anything or need anything from her other than her body.

 

He tipped her chin and kissed her hard, pressing his tongue past her teeth.  He tasted of the wine they’d both consumed.  Paige didn’t like it.  She twisted in his grip, grinding her hips back against his, leaning her head back against him.  He didn’t seem to mind the change in position as he gripped her hips tighter, as his hands ran up her ribcage and brushed the sides of her breasts.

 

Paige knew he was touching her.  She knew he wanted her. And yet, nothing inside of her responded.  The wine made her slow and sluggish, made her more tolerant of his pawing.  But for all the freedom she felt in his embrace, she didn’t want this.

 

She shook her head and pushed away, staggering the few steps until she could put her hand out against the wall.  Bodies crashed into her, too mindless in their own pursuits of the flesh to even notice she was there.  Rueben started to follow and Paige gave a fleeting thought to how she was going to get rid of him - when she realized she didn’t have to get rid of him.  He was gone.  And no one was running into her.

 

She sensed him long before she looked up.  She’d never felt anything like him before, the sheer weight of his dreamscape in the aether.  She looked up, and up.  Even in heels he still towered over her, no mean feat.  She blinked at him, slowly.  

 

He was the most beautiful and terrifying thing she had ever seen.

 

* * *

 

Arcturus stared down at the girl. _Paige_.  Jaxon Hall’s shining jewel.  He didn’t know what he had expected, but she just blinked up at him.  He was reminded of a chol-bird, fearless but curious, able to be compelled, but keeping its own counsel.

 

He watched as, with great concentration, she reached out and placed her hand against his chest.  He watched the sensation hit her, the way her head snapped back slightly, the way her nostrils flared and pupils dilated.  Open mouthed, she stared up at him.  

 

“What are you?”

 

He looked down at her.  

 

* * *

 

The stranger took Paige’s hand.  He looked like a wealthy Scion denizen, dressed in dark, richly texture fabrics.  The exquisitely cut trousers, shirt and jacket were undoubtedly bespoke.  With those proportions, he couldn't buy something off the rack.  Not that she could imagine him in a boutique - or anywhere really, other than this hazy fog that currently swathed her mind.

 

He drew her deeper into the fray.  The writhing bodies parted easily before him.  She could feel the beat of her pulse in her hand where they touched.   _What was he?_

 

She closed her eyes, allowing him to pull her along, following him with only her sixth sense.  It wasn’t so much following as being pulled toward his gravity.  She was a seventh order voyant, one of the rarest and, potentially, most powerful human clairvoyants.  She knew other powerful voyants, mime-lords, mime-queens and mollishers.  Jax and Nick were among the strongest she knew and even they were flickering matches next to the scorching spotlight of this stranger’s wake in the aether.

 

He found a dark corner and pulled her close.  The sheer bulk of his body blocked out most of the rest of the club.  She waited, expecting him to pant and paw like the amaurotic boy, but he did not.  She looked up at him again and noticed how his eyes glowed faintly yellow.  

 

She was never going to drink alcohol again.  

 

Ever.

 

* * *

 

Paige Mahoney, Jaxon Hall’s mollisher, was tall, but willowy with pale pinky skin flushed from alcohol.  She was so different from a Rephaite, in ways he hadn’t considered.  He’d never been this close to a human.  It would have been so easy, in that moment, to hurt her.  She was fearless, this one, but scrappy.  He understood why Hall spent years grooming her.  She was truly a jewel.

 

“You’re not one of Hector’s,” she said, swaying slightly.  Her words slurred.

 

He shook his head.  “No, little dreamer.  I am not one of Hector’s.”  Arcturus was aware of Haymarket Hector, the current Under-lord of the Scion citadel of London, but he’d never had reason to interact with the vile creature.

 

She blinked up at him again and then with great deliberation, touched him again.  Her fingers skimmed up his chest, to the open neck of his shirt.  Both of their breaths caught as her fingers brushed against the beat of his pulse near the hollow of his throat.

 

She leaned in closer, pushing herself on tiptoe, swaying against him.  Unbidden, his arms wrapped around her, gathering her close.  He wasn’t prepared for the sensation of touching her - of touching _any_ human.  Her flesh was so cold, but he could feel the frantic beat of her pulse so clearly, nearly taste the life burning inside her fragile form.

 

This was forbidden.  Even for an outcast such as himself, touching her - _touching any human_ \-  was an unthinkable crime.  He held her carefully, willing her to sense the danger he presented, willing her to fight.

 

Her fingertips played over his jaw, drawing his face down.  She pressed her cheek to his, rubbing against him.  She giggled, a sound he was fairly certain he had never heard her make in all his months of watching.  

 

“Touching you is like touching the aether,” she whispered, her voice feather light and filled with wonder.

 

His eyes fluttered shut.  How long had it been since any being had deliberately touched him?  How long had it been since any being had spoken to him as if he was something other than rot?  He could feel the fierce beat of her heart.  He could feel the fire within her.

 

“I told Jax he was wrong,” she said, curling herself against him, tucking her head under his chin.

 

“Wrong?” he asked.

 

She made a smug, contented sound, nodding.  “My numa,” she said.  “Jax says dreamwalkers don’t have numa, but I do.  It’s you.”

 

* * *

 

Paige felt him go very still.  She pulled away and stared up into his features.  He looked more like sculpture than living flesh.  Even in the dim light, she could see the metallic sheen of his honey golden skin, the faint light of his irises.  His eyes didn’t contain colobomas, but she sensed he didn’t need them to view the aether.  He _was_ the aether.

 

“What did you say?” he asked, so quietly that she shouldn’t have been able to hear him over the music, but she did.

 

“My numa,” she repeated.  “You’re  my numa.”  Not entirely true.  It wasn’t like she needed him in order to touch the aether.  But being in close proximity certainly helped.

 

He just stared at her, unblinking.  

 

She smiled.  “I’m really drunk.”

 

“I know, little dreamer.”

 

She frowned.  “You know who I am.”

 

“And you know who I am,” he replied evenly.

 

Her brow puckered in a frown.  She most certainly did not know who he was.

 

“Your numa,” he said evenly.

 

She giggled again, curling up against his broad chest.  He was so very large.  It was wonderful.  She did tire of towering over men, of having to hunch to spare their precious egos.  She took one of his hands in both of hers and studied it.  He was unbelievably warm.  His knuckles were calloused and his hands were easily twice as large as hers.

 

She ran her fingers over his scarred knuckles.  “These are fighter’s hands,” she said.  Chat's hand was like this.

 

He nodded.

 

* * *

 

Jaxon Hall groomed this girl for years - a decade at least.  The poltergeist attack that springboarded her voyant abilities and Dr. Nygard’s serendipitous intervention, both of those reeked of Hall’s machinations.

 

But how could Hall have known?  He wasn’t an oracle.  And it was unlikely that Dr. Nygard, for all of his loyalty to Hall, would knowingly proceed with a plan to harm a child.  No, Jaxon Hall had known about Paige, known about her abilities before they even existed.  But what ties could Hall possibly have had to the child, Paige?  She hadn’t even been born until a year after Jaxon Hall traded hundreds of lives for his freedom from Sheol I.  Paige wasn’t even -

 

Arcturus stopped cold and stared down at the girl.  She blinked up at him.

 

She frowned.  “What?”

 

He shook his head.  “Come, dreamer,” he said.  “Let’s get you home.”

 

* * *

 

They walked along the darkened alleyways, hand in hand, staying to the shadows, away from the prying eye of Scion.  Paige didn’t sober up, but the novelty of being drunk was waning quickly.  She was shivering and without a word, he shrugged out of his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. It looked ridiculous, at least twice too big for her, but it did ward off the chill. Warmth, however, wasn't enough. By the time they hailed a buck cab, her feet were aching and her head was starting to pound.  

 

He took up most of the seat and she slumped against him, feeling decidedly sick.  She didn’t question when he directed the driver to the Barbican Estate in I-5.  She still officially lived there with her father, though she mostly resided at the den in I-4 with Jax.  

 

The cab hadn’t even stopped moving before Paige was stumbling out, retching on her hands and knees in the shrubbery.  She knew he was standing there and she wished he would just fuck off.  She didn’t need an audience for this.

 

But he didn’t fuck off.  He was there, helping her to her feet.  He handed her a handkerchief, which she accepted wordlessly, using it to wipe her mouth.  Her knees buckled and he immediately scooped her into his arms.  She felt ridiculous, but she was too sick to care.

 

Thankfully, Vic was out on rounds when they entered the lobby.  Paige really didn’t want anybody to see her being carried around like some broken doll by this stranger.  He took her keycard from her clammy hand and swiped in.

 

The apartment, blessedly, was empty.  Her father must still be at work.  She had no idea how this stranger knew where she lived, but she didn’t feel like there was much use in asking.  He was clearly a man of few words.  And she was rather terrified at the prospect of find out just how much he knew about her.

 

Besides, if he’d wanted to kill her, it would have been so much easier to dispose of her body outside that flash house in II-6.

 

As they entered her room, he set her gently on her feet.  She stood there for a moment, swaying, before she bolted for the bathroom.  She didn’t know how long she sat there on the bathroom floor, arms wrapped around the toilet bowl like a drowning man clinging to a buoy.  She started crying at some point.  She didn’t know why.  Crying over Nick.  Crying over her wounded pride.  Crying because her head pounded and her knees were all skinned to hell. Crying because she probably barfed all over his fancy jacket.

 

He flicked on the light and she didn’t fight him as he urged her to lean back against the cold, tiled wall.  Her hands were limp at her sides as he wiped her face with a warm flannel.  She watched him in the unflattering glow of the fluorescent bathroom lights. Bastard still looked like something out of a dream.  When he offered her a glass of water, she took it.

 

He helped her to her feet and followed her back to her room.  He turned his back as she dropped his jacket to the floor and shimmied out of the ridiculous dress and pulled her softest nightshirt over her head.  It was ridiculously childish, with giant pink flowers and dancing kittens.  She sat heavily on the bed and he turned back toward her, urging her to get under the covers.  He sat there, looking at her, but not touching.  Despite feeling like death, her head was clearer.  She’d expected her perception of him to fade along with her buzz, but it didn’t.  He seemed every bit as unreal now as he had in the club.

 

“Who are you?” she asked, her throat scratchy and sore.

 

“You may call me Warden,” he said quietly.

 

She studied him.  She had no idea how old he was.  His features were so smooth and flawless, but he didn’t strike her as someone particularly young.  His eyes were heavy lidded and still faintly luminous.  His coarse brown hair just brushed the tops of his shoulders.  In the dim light filtering through her windows, his skin looked like polished bronze, every bit as perfect and cold.  But he wasn’t cold.  She knew that.  She’d felt his warmth, far warmer than any human was capable of withstanding.

 

“And if I ask around about Warden?” she asked.

 

He looked down for a moment, taking a deep breath.  “I would advise you not to do that.”

 

She studied him in the silence.  When she left the apartment hours earlier, she wanted to bury her pain, to find someone to lose herself with.  But she didn’t feel lost.  She felt seen.  Perhaps for the first time in her life.  It was terrifying.

 

Without a word, he pushed himself to his feet.  He stopped at her door and glanced back at her.

 

“Will I see you again?” she asked.

 

He smiled.  “Undoubtedly, dreamer.  We have not had our dance.”

  
END CHAPTER.


	2. Saloop and Soup

Paige never mentioned anything about that night to anyone.  Nothing about Nick, nothing about the flash house.  Certainly nothing about Warden.  The next morning she’d woken up feeling sicker than she ever dreamed possible and she renewed her vow to never touch alcohol.  She didn’t go back to the den that weekend.  She was still shaken by her conversation with Nick, though her life had certainly taken a strange turn directly after he broke her heart.  She felt no less eviscerated by the fact that Nick loved another, but Warden played heavily on her mind.  He was such a curiosity.

 

Paige would have been inclined to think the entire night was some kind of bad Floxy reaction, but in the morning she’d found his jacket crumpled in the middle of her bedroom floor where she’d dropped it last night.  Also, she hadn’t had any Floxy.  Or tincto.  Or aster.  Or anything that could even remotely be responsible for the level of delusion that was Warden.

 

The weekend crept by.  Her father was obviously concerned, though their estrangement was so entrenched at that point, that he offered little more support than asking her if she wanted a cup of tea.  She accepted the tea.  She sat on the couch next to him while he watched some horrid, Scion-produced sitcom.  She mourned a life she would never have with Nick.  And she pondered the subject of Warden.

 

Warden intimated that it would be dangerous for her to ask around about him.  Though she wasn’t sure where the danger was supposed to come from.  Was the danger from Warden himself?  She doubted it.  If he’d wanted to hurt her, he’d had plenty of opportunities.  Plus, she found him far more intriguing than frightening.  Which wasn’t to say that he didn’t frighten her.  He did.  She just wasn’t sure why he frightened her.  Also, she was pretty damn sure he wasn’t human.

 

The realization jolted through her bones.  She was dimly aware of the tinny canned laugh track on the sitcom.   _Warden wasn’t human_.

 

She shook her head - and immediately regretted it.  That wasn’t possible.  Even Jaxon, with all of his complex categorizations of voyants, had never suggested that there were beings other than humans.  Well, if you didn’t count psychopomps.  

 

Yet, no other answer seemed to fit.  When she’d touched Warden, it had been like touching the aether.  And it wasn’t just because she was stinking drunk.  He wasn’t human.

 

Paige knew she was fixating on Warden to avoid having to face her humiliation with Nick, though she didn’t particularly care.  What was another festering emotional wound next to the realization that she’d nearly snogged someone who wasn’t human.  And she _had_ snogged some flash house hipster.  Damn.  She’d nearly managed to forget that entirely.

 

* * *

Her father left for work hours before Paige gathered her things to head back to I-4 on Monday morning.  She left the nightshirt with kittens and flowers in her dresser, but took Warden’s jacket.  It was comically too large.  But if she rolled back the sleeves and belted it, it worked as a coat.  It still smelled faintly of him, some subtly earthy scent she couldn’t identify.

 

Jax was about to have a fit by the time she finally got back to the den.  It would take weeks to completely pacify him.  The thought was exhausting, but Paige didn’t have much choice.  Before she’d ever set her pack in her room, he sent her out on three separate errands.  They were all bullshit things he could easily have couriers handle.  She was being punished and she knew it.  At least it gave her another reason to avoid Nick and Zeke.

 

The first two errands were rent collection from a couple of lowlife courtiers.  They were both reigning and it took hours to collect.  Even then, it was only a quarter of what they owed Jax.  She knew she’d be back in a few days to turn them out.  The third errand was a wild goose chase that yielded no results at all.  By the time Paige headed back to Dials, it was getting dark.  She tucked the coat more tightly around her body as she kept to the sidestreets.  The NVD patrols would be out soon.

 

What had been a drizzling rain decide to really let loose and Paige ducked into Chateline’s to wait for it to pass.  She knew she should hurry back to Jax, lest he get even more worked up about her absence.  But having spent most of the day taking care of his shit work, far below her station as a mollisher, she wasn’t feeling terribly accommodating.  

 

She didn’t have enough money to eat, so she sat in a dark corner of the bar and ordered a saloop.  After the last weekend’s overindulgence, the thought of even mecks turned her stomach.  She sat there for long minutes, sipping the saloop, resenting Jax.

 

“Can I buy you a drink?”

 

She knew the voice before she turned and it caused a shiver of anticipation to tickle up her spine.  She looked up into the time-aged mirror behind the bar and narrowed her eyes at Warden’s reflection.  “That’s not funny.”

 

He took the empty barstool next to her, even more in the shadows than she.  “I was not suggesting anything containing alcohol.”  

 

She rested her elbow on the bar, propping her fist under her chin as she studied him.  She truly couldn’t tell if he was being a smartass or not.  She turned back toward the bar and took another drink.  “Besides, Chat’s doesn’t serve the real stuff.  It’s not that kind of place.”

 

His expression was impassive.  “Ah, yes, I am well aware of what a compliant Scion denizen Mr. Chateline is.”

 

Okay, he was definitely being a smartass.  She watched as he motioned to a waitron and ordered a coffee and a cup of soup.  They sat in companionable silence.  When he wasn’t looking, Paige studied his reflection in the mirror.  She’d hoped that when she was sober he’d seem less impressive, but it had been in vain.  Warden was sinfully handsome.  His face was sculptural, with high cheekbones, high, straight brows and a broad forehead.  Even in the dim light, his skin still had a faint metallic sheen, the texture flawless.  His strong jaw was unmarked by any type of facial hair.  And he was tall, incredibly tall.  At 5’9”, Paige was accustomed to towering over many people, but Warden was at least a foot taller than she.  

 

When the waitron returned, Warden took the coffee, but slid the soup over to Paige.  She stared at it.  It looked delicious, a creamy tomato with goat cheese and thyme sprinkled on top.  The smell made her stomach growl.

 

Shaking her head, she pushed it away.  “I’m not hungry.”

 

He sighed.  “You’re starving,” he said quietly.  He wrapped his hands around the coffee, but did not drink.  “Your mime-lord has had you running all over the central cohort taking care of menial tasks all day.”

 

Paige sputtered.  “What the fuck?  Are you stalking me now?  How do you - “

 

“I do not know,” he said, quietly but firmly.  “But I do know what kind of man your mime-lord is.  Petulant.  Vicious.  Possessive.  You are starving and you have no money.  He does all this to keep you bound ever more tightly to him.”

 

Paige’s mouth fell open and she snapped it shut again.  She snorted out a breath.  She wanted to argue with him.  Warden didn’t understand how it was with Jax.  Jax took her in when no one else would have her.  He gave her purpose.  “Who says I even have a mime-lord,” she muttered.

 

“Eat the soup, or not,” Warden said plainly.  “But I will not eat it.  It will go to waste.”  

 

Paige wanted to throw the soup at him.  But she was starving.  And if she stormed out, she wasn’t going to have time to learn more about him.  Jax demanded to know about new arrivals in the cohort.  She would be failing in her duties as a mollisher to not investigate properly.  She took the soup and carefully lifted the spoon to her lips.  It was delicious.

 

She watched him as she sipped her soup.  In the dim light, he could pass as human.  When she finished the soup, she spoke again.  “You’re not human, are you?”

 

“That is incredibly forward, Ms. Mahoney.”  He turned to look at her.

 

“No more forward than asking me about my mime-lord.”  That was the gods honest truth.  Mime-crime could land her in the Tower.  Syndicate business wasn’t discussed outside of the syndicate.  And Paige knew that there was no way Warden was a syndie.

 

“Touche.”

 

She went back to her saloop and Warden finished his coffee.  They sat there, side by side, in silence.  

 

“I misplaced my jacket last weekend,” he said, seemingly to no one in particular.  He turned to her.  “But it seems to have been commandeered for other purposes.”

 

“I’m not giving it back,” she said, the words out of her mouth before she even realized she intended to reply.  To hide her shock, she made her expression defiant.

 

He actually smiled then.  “It is fine,” he said.  “It looks better on you.”

 

That was a lie.  The coat looked ridiculous on Paige.  But she wasn’t giving it back.

 

By the time Paige’s saloop was gone, the rain had stopped.  They stepped outside together and Warden hailed a buck cab.  It was the safest way to travel through the cohort at night, with the NVD patrols.  He opened the door for her and handed the driver some coins.  “Beware of Jaxon Hall,” he said quietly.  “He is not what he seems.”

 

And with that, he was gone.

  
END CHAPTER


	3. Broads and Bones

“ _Sötnos_.”

 

Paige looked over at Nick and smiled wryly.

 

He tapped her twice in the middle of her forehead with his forefinger.  “Your mind is far away from here,” he said quietly, turning back to stare out at the night cityscape.

 

“Isn’t that my raison d’etre?” she asked with a self-deprecating smile.  “To be far away.  To watch and report back.”

 

“Your spirit perhaps,” he said, leaning back against the crumbling brick steeple.  “But not your mind.”  He lifted his arm and pulled her close, tucking her against his side.  

 

She leaned into him, relishing the comforting smell that always clung to him.  She’d missed him, these long weeks that they’d been estranged.  As much as it shattered her when he didn’t reciprocate her romantic inclinations, losing her best friend had been far more damaging.

 

She knew he wanted to ask what was wrong, but he was afraid.  Afraid to learn that the source of her pain was his careless words about Zeke.  But Nick had always been braver than she.

 

“Sötnos, I’m sorry,” he said quietly.  “I wished I’d had time to say it that night.  I wish - “

 

She pushed away from him and turned around to look at him.  She leaned forward and pressed a soft, chaste kiss to his lips.  “It’s okay,” she said.  “I understand.”

 

He smiled sadly.  “I was an ass,” he said.

 

“You were a boy in love,” she said softly.  “Just not with me.”

 

“Paige,” he said, pulling her close again.

 

“It’s okay,” she said, curling into him again.  “Really.  It is.”

 

“I don’t think I believe you,” he said.  “Where have you been?  You’ve been disappearing for weeks.”

 

“Jax has be running around like mad any time I’m not in the aether,” she said.  “You know that.”

 

“I do know that,” he admitted.  “But I also know that you’re avoiding me.”

 

She shrugged.  “Maybe a little,” she admitted.  “But truly, that’s not it.  I’ve just  - needed time to think.”

 

“ _Sötnos_ ,” Nick said, a warning clear in his voice.  “I understand the irony of me saying this, but you know Jaxon’s rules.  No commitment.”

 

She raised an eyebrow at him.  “Commitment?”

 

“I’m not blind,” he said.  “And I’m not Jax, so busy trying to take over the world that I can’t spare a thought for you.  Who is he?”

 

Paige shook her head.  “Nick, there’s no one.  I swear.”

 

“Don’t swear,” he said, frowning.  “I haven’t missed your new coat, Paige.”

 

She looked down at her coat - formerly Warden’s jacket.  It was looking decidedly worse for the wear.  “I found it,” she said.  Not completely a lie.  “It’s nothing.”

 

He frowned at her, but fell silent.  She had the distinct impression he didn’t want to hear her lie to him anymore and that broke her heart more than a little.  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to tell Nick about Warden.  It was that she didn’t want to tell _anyone_ about Warden.  The whole thing felt so strange and fragile, like if she mentioned him aloud, he would disappear in a puff of smoke.

 

* * *

“Paige, why do you think Jaxon Hall never made you his nightwalker?”

 

She sputtered, twisting to face Warden.  He’d shown up, out of the blue, as per usual, about ten minutes earlier, trailing her as she headed to the Garden.  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

 

“It is a very straightforward question,” he said. “And a common agreement, as I understand it, between a mime-lord and his or her mollisher.”

 

Paige opened her mouth, searching for words.  Thank god the tunnel was deserted aside from them.  No one could overhear this.  “It’s not like that with Jax.”

 

“But why?”  He stood there, looking at down her, like he was looking through her, to the center of her.  “Do not tell me it is because Jaxon Hall is above such behavior.”

 

She shook her head in disgust and turned away, continuing down the tunnel.  “Jax has a rule against commitment.”

 

“A rule against commitment _to anyone other than himself_ ,” Warden pushed.  “You must know that is the root of his decree.  He wants no one to have more influence over his Seals than he himself wields.  It does not explain why has not sought to subjugate you sexually.  He has already done so emotionally and financially.”

 

Paige shook her head reflexively, disgusted by the unwanted mental image of Jaxon -   _No_.  She just couldn’t go there.  She wouldn’t.  It wasn’t like that, no matter what Warden thought.  What did he know anyway?  “It’s not like that,” she said again, this time more softly.

 

“That it ‘ _is not like that_ ’ is not up for debate,” he said. “I understand as much.  Jaxon Hall does not intend to bed you.  What I wonder is _why_?”

 

Paige wasn’t sure her ego could take much more.  “Maybe he doesn’t like girls,” she bit out acerbically.

 

“No, Paige,” Warden said carefully.  “That is Dr. Nygard.  And potentially Mr. Saenz.  I am curious about Jaxon Hall.  I understand he may not be interested in sex at all, but even taking that into consideration, I would think he would not be above engaging in sexual intercourse merely as a way of controlling you.”

 

She stopped walking, her body shaking.  She twisted in the tunnel to face him.  The only light was a bare bulb swinging from a threadbare wire.  “I understand that nobody wants me!” she yelled.  She caught herself and her next words came out as a tight whisper.  “What the fuck difference does it make to you?”

 

He simply stood there.  Slowly, he blinked.  “I have upset you.”

 

“Oh my fucking god,” she said, laughing to herself.  “You think?  Fuck you!”  She turned on her heel and stalked away.

 

The Garden, thankfully, was packed with voyants hawking their wares and services.  Paige ducked into a booth selling decks and dice.  She didn’t need any.  They were useless to her.  But it gave her something else to concentrate on.  She pushed down the violent tumult of emotions Warden’s words had wrought. She didn’t really think he had intended to be cruel, but she also didn’t care.  Fuck him.  Fuck his shiny alien skin and freaky ass glowing eyes.  And fuck his questions.  She didn’t owe it to some inhuman bastard to defend her relationship with Jaxon Hall.

 

Feeling marginally more composed, Paige headed to her booth.  She unlocked the padlock and started setting up with a practiced familiarity.  She was just unrolling the latest canvas, one of Pieter’s when she felt him.

 

“Why don’t you just stop asking me,” she said, without turning.  “And _tell_ me.”

 

He was standing in the next stall, one full of dried chicken feet and stinking herbs, belonging to Margie, who was deaf as a post.  “I do not understand.”

 

“No,” she said with a humorless laugh.  “Of course you don’t.”  She turned and looked through the slats between the stalls at Warden.  “Go away before you start scaring away the customers,” she said.  Truthfully, she didn’t want him standing in the middle of the Garden.  She was shocked he was there at all.  He usually was much better about sticking to the shadows.  He was bound to attract attention in the open.  

 

With the booth set up, she took a seat in a folding chair and waited for customers, fully aware that Warden was still watching her.

 

“You keep asking me these questions,” she said under her breath.  “You’re trying to lead me to something, to _your_ point of view.  Why don’t you spare us both the time and just fucking tell me what it is you’re trying to tell me.  Because this twenty questions bullshit isn’t getting us anywhere.  So Jax doesn’t try to fuck me.  Big deal.  He doesn’t try to fuck Eliza or Danica or Nadine either.  He’s not like that.”  

 

“Ms. Renton is a mere third level clairvoyant,” Warden replied blandly.  

 

Fine, Paige could concede that point.  Jax definitely was a snob when it came to the lower orders.  But that didn’t explain the others.  “And Danica?  She’s not a lower level,” Paige pushed, though even if she could force herself to try and imagine - which, truthfully, she wouldn’t - Jax and Danica together, it wasn’t possible.  Nothing about them meshed.  In voyant terms they weren’t compatible.  Physically they were polar opposites.  Jax was tall and thin with jet dark hair and pale blue eyes, all slick charm and control.  Danica was stout with bright red hair and both an aura and attitude about as coarse as they came.

 

“While Jaxon Hall would prefer female company,” Warden said quietly.  “So does Ms. Panic.”

 

“ _Touche_.”  While Paige hadn’t ever considered Dani’s sexuality, that certainly wasn’t a surprise.  “And Nadine?” she pushed, mostly to see what Warden would say.

 

Warden remained silent.  Not a word of protest.

 

Paige stood up from her chair and leaned against the wall, glaring through the slats between the booths.  “What?” she tried to whisper.  “Jax and  - and - _Nadine_?”  Paige couldn’t wrap her mind around it.  “Nadine’s a fucking _hisser_ ,” she spat.  “And _American_.”

 

Warden merely looked at her, his expression implacable.  Paige turned away.  What other sordid details did he possess about the inner workings of the Seven Seals?  Jaxon would die - well, okay, not die.  But Jaxon would certainly kill people, multiple people, if he ever found out that someone outside of his Den had this kind of information about how he kept his house in order.  Jax and Nadine?

 

“Leave,” Paige said.  “Just - I can’t.  Go.”

 

She wasn’t so much aware of Warden’s exit as she was of the dawning awareness of his absence.  She had no idea where he went when he wasn’t dropping in on her, ruining her days.  At the moment, she didn’t particularly care either.

 

* * *

From a business perspective, the day turned out fairly well.  She sold two of Pieter’s works, both to tourists from Asia, which was the best kind of transaction.  Much less chance of blowbacks on those sales.

 

She locked up shop and made it back to the den before it really started raining.  Nadine was sitting in the front room, looking sour as usual and Paige couldn’t prevent a mental image of the hisser and Jax.  She shuddered.

 

“What is Mahoney?” Nadine snapped.

 

“Nothing,” Paige mumbled, heading to her room.  She passed Nick on the stairs, but he was in a hurry and had little time to do anything except give her hand a gentle squeeze.

 

“Jax wants you on lookout!” Nadine bellowed from downstairs.

 

“Fine,” Paige yelled back.  “Gimme five.”  She and Nadine had never gotten along.  Mostly, Paige was certain, because Nadine was a right cunt.  But maybe there was a bit more to it.  Warden had a point.  It was a regular arrangement for a mime-lord and his mollisher to be a couple.  She’d seen other mime-lords and mollishers, hell even Hector and Cutmouth.  There tended to be no doubt about whom held the mollisher’s reins.  A mollisher’s devotion couldn’t be questioned.  

 

But Jax had never wanted that from Paige.  He was an ass from time to time, but he never demanded her body as part of the contract, mostly, she assumed, because he didn't give a toss about sex.  He’d given her respect, freedom.  He made her one of the most important syndies in the central cohort when she was barely out of school, and all of it without forcing her to -  She pushed the thought away.  

 

But if Jax was involved with Nadine on the side, and the sly, that could explain why Nadine hated her so much.  Not only was Nadine not Jax’s mollisher, he made it clear that Nadine was only a hisser.  And he made her busk in the square for money.  The only reason Nadine was even part of the Seals was because Jax wanted Nadine’s brother - Zeke, the Unreadable - and they were a matched set.

 

Warden had said more than once that Jax wasn’t what he seemed.  Paige still didn’t know exactly what that meant.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it meant.

 

* * *

Paige blinked up at Dani.

 

“Welcome back,” Dani said dryly, turning away and back to whatever her current project was.

 

Paige sat up and rubbed the back of her neck.  The aether had been uneventful.  While there definitely was a newcomer in the cohort, Paige knew it was Warden.  She would recognize his dreamscape anywhere.  She hoped to god that Jax never found out about him.  Jax would be livid if he ever discovered she kept something of this magnitude from him.

 

Jaxon Hall wasn’t what he seemed.  Great.  But what about Warden?  Paige didn’t even know what Warden was supposed to seem like.  Warden appeared with no warning and insisted on asking her questions about her role as Jax’s mollisher.  What exactly did _she_ mean to Warden?  Paige was beginning to suspect that for all of Warden’s cryptic bullshit about Jax, that her only real appeal to Warden was also that she was Jax’s mollisher.  What bad blood lay between Jax and Warden?

 

Warden certainly didn’t follow her around for the scintillating conversation.  And he made it perfectly clear that neither Jax, nor anyone else, had any physical interest in her.  That hazy night at the club seemed a million years ago.  Had she really touched him?  Had he really carried her up to her father’s apartment? She didn’t know and she wasn’t sure she cared.

 

It was late, too late.  She needed to shake down those idiot courtiers again.  They’d better have Jax’s rent this time, or Paige really was going to put them out on the street.  They wouldn’t last long.  Types like that never did.  They’d be picked up by the NVD patrols in no time.  She felt bad, but not bad enough to change her plans.  Jax gave her a job and she intended to do it.  Jax was her mime-lord and she was his mollisher.

 

END CHAPTER


	4. (Better) Living Through Chemistry

Paige belted her coat tighter and pulled the hat down over her hair.  Head down, eyes open.  She nodded to Zeke as she headed for the door.  It was twilight, getting late.  Jax and Nick had both been out, probably meeting with Didion.  Jax wanted some ‘geist that Didion supposedly had.  Paige suspected that Didion was just yanking Jax’s chain, but she’d leave that to her mime-lord to sort out.

 

The streets were packed with commuters trying to get out of the city and back to their homes.  There wasn’t a buck cab to be found anywhere.  With a curse, Paige started walking.

 

She’d gone a couple of blocks before she felt him.  She’d been expecting it, considering how close he had felt when she’d been scanning the aether earlier.  Though ... as she instinctively reached out for him, something felt _off_.   She didn’t know what it was.

 

“I owe you an apology,” he said quietly.

 

Paige had been trying to stalk ahead of him, but there was absolutely no point.  He was so much taller that he had no problem at all keeping pace with her.  She slowed down.  “Yes, you do,” she said, not deigning to look at him.  Who was he to just drop in on her whenever he felt like it and turn her world upside down?  She didn’t want anyone looking to think they were together.  He was about as conspicuous as it was possible to get.  Bad news for the NVD patrols.

 

“I apologize.”

 

She shook her head and rolled her eyes.  Seriously?  That was all she got?  She kept walking.  The shithole building Jax controlled was only a couple of blocks up the street.

 

She turned back to Warden and almost jumped.  She had not expected him to be so close.  “You’re going to have to try harder than that,” she said, attempting to hide her surprise.

 

“It would not be safe to tell you more,” he said.  “But please trust me.  I am only concerned for your welfare.”

 

“Excuse me if I don’t take your word for it,” Paige bit out.  She’d learned the hard way that when someone else told her it wasn’t safe, they invariably meant it wasn’t safe _for them_.  Warden was - well, truthfully she didn’t have a clue what Warden was.  Or what existed between them, if anything.  The only thing she was certain of was that Warden was very interested in convincing her that Jax was up to no good - which, she already knew, thank you very much.  He was a fucking mime-lord.  It was part of the job.

 

“Paige, you do not understand,” he said - again, more closely than she expected.  “Jaxon Hall is not the man you think he is.”

 

She gave him a sidelong glance and then jogged forward a couple of steps, trying to put some distance between them.  “Don’t worry,” Paige said, “I don’t have a lot of illusions about Jax.”

 

Warden, for once, was silent.  Paige turned the corner quickly.  She just wanted to get the rent and get the hell back to the den.  The fact that the fuckups who rented the shithole flat probably weren’t going to have the money - again-  put her in a sour mood.  She pushed inside the building.  The crumbling foyer smelled like piss and vomit.

 

She turned left and headed for the flat at the end of the hall.  The door slightly ajar.  Idiot courtiers, probably reigning out of their damn minds, too blitzed to even lock the damn door.  They were going to deserve the turn out.  She slammed her hands against the door and pushed.

 

“ _Paige_ \- “

 

There was something in Warden’s voice, a hint of panic and Paige was just turning to tell him to fuck the hell off, when something whizzed past her ear.  She twisted instinctively dropping into a crouch as the baton impacted with the doorframe above her head.  She was crouched in the doorway, half in the shitty little room and half out in the hallway.  She was aware of her hand resting in a thick, cooling, viscous liquid.

 

Paige blinked blindly at the courtiers, their unseeing eyes staring at nothing.  A hand grabbed the front of her shirt and roughly pulled her to her feet.  She opened her mouth, but made no sound as she gazed into the face of a NVD underguard.  She stared into the coloboma in his right eye.

 

She didn’t have time to react as something - Warden, she realized - rammed into the back of her, sending both her and the underguard spinning away.  There were at least two more NVD agents.  They turned toward Warden as Paige scrambled away.  The building was a horror, a holdover from a time when children labored in workhouses and people were sent to debtor's prison.  It was a warren of crumbling hallways and rickety floors.  The building should have been torn down fifty years ago.

 

Paige ran, she ducked down the twisting hallway, making a right and then a left.  She rammed one of the doors, unsurprised when the wood gave way and the door splintered.  She ran through the flat.  There were three kids, all less than fifteen years old, amaurotic at a glance.  They might not be okay, but the NVD officers shouldn’t be interested in them.  

 

Paige jumped out an open window and climbed like Nick taught her, up two flights on the a crumbling fire escape before ducking back into a flat.  This one was empty.  She vaulted over an old couch and was back in the hallway.  There was an access door to the roof, she was certain.  If she could get to the roof, she could jump to the adjacent building and make a getaway.

 

She was halfway down the hallway, sprinting for the roof access when two of the NVD agents burst out of a stairwell, directly in her path.  She skittered to a halt and spun, running in the opposite direction.  One of the doors was open and she ran inside.  Mistake.  The floor was eaten away and she immediately fell, crashing into the flat below.  She lay there, dazed.  She had to get up.  She had to run.  They would take her to the Tower.

 

Dimly, she was aware of someone rolling her onto her back.  She blinked up into his face.   _Warden_.  She tried to speak, but she couldn’t pull any air into her lungs.  She raised her hand toward his face, watching dumbly as his eyes turned from yellow to a deep, fiery red.  Her vision dimmed.  She couldn’t hear.  Everything went black.

 

She didn’t know how long she lay there, unable to do anything.  She couldn’t open her eyes.  She couldn't lift her head.  She was vaguely aware of someone - the NVD agents? - crouching over her body.  This was it.  They were going to kill her.  One of them kicked her roughly in the side, though she couldn’t really feel it.  She was aware that they were speaking, but couldn’t make out words.  One of them grabbed the lapels of her coat and lifted her upper body off the floor before unceremoniously dropping her again.  Everything went black.

 

* * *

Paige’s consciousness surfaced slowly.  She was aware of pain and not much else.  She groaned, trying to curl on her side, but quickly stopped as agony ripped through her side.  Everything was wrong.  She couldn't feel the aether.

 

“Paige?”

 

It was Warden.  So they were both still alive.  She didn’t know how that was possible.  She opened one eye.  She was lying in a bed, mounded with thick blankets.  She blinked up at the ceiling, which was stories above.  Were they in some kind of warehouse?  She could hear birds, it sounded like a cavernous space.

 

The last thing she was aware of before she lost consciousness was his hand, brushing the hair back from her face.

 

* * *

The second time Paige awoke it was morning.  She could see the pale light of dawn filtering through a window high above.  Where the fuck were they?  She glanced around and realized that Warden was in bed with her.  Well, not in bed _with her_.  He lay several feet away on the large bed, facedown in the blankets, looking dead to the world.  She reached over and unceremoniously poked him in the cheek.

 

He came awake with a start.  “Paige,” he said, sounding relieved.

 

She ran her tongue over her teeth, grimacing.  She felt like shit, but she could sense the aether again.  “Where are we?”

 

He gave her a wry smile. “My place.”

 

She looked around.  It was a deserted building of some type, a warehouse, a church maybe?  He had a bed, obviously.  And there was a writing desk and an armoire.  Not much else.  Was that a radio?

 

He pushed himself up into a sitting position.  “How do you feel?”

 

“Like shit,” she said, frowning.  She wasn’t up to sitting up.  “What the hell happened?’

 

He scrubbed a hand over his face.  “NVD,” he said.  “Apparently the delinquent courtiers attracted their attention.”

 

“And I barged right into the middle of it,” she said.

 

He nodded.  

 

“How did we get away?”  She remembered the fall, Warden’s eyes and then the officers.  By all rights, she should have woken up in the Tower, or not at all.  She should be dead.  That’s what happened to voyants who tangled with NVD agents.  NiteKind, the gallows, the Tower.  None of it ended well.  Ever.

 

Warden stared across the room at nothing.  Slowly, he turned to her.  “They passed you by, in favor of me.  I was able to lose them and double back to get you.”

 

She laughed humorlessly and immediately regretted it as her ribs protested.  No NVD agent who intended to get his thirty years would ever pass her by.  She was exactly the kind of voyant they were patrolling for.  “Why would they leave me for you?”

 

He looked uncomfortable.   “None of them were fully sighted.  They didn’t see you as something worth the effort.  They wanted me.”

 

She stared at him.  Undoubtedly in voyant terms, Warden was a better catch than she.  But as a seventh level voyant, she wasn’t someone the NVD would leave behind.  She shook her head.  “I remember your eyes,” she said.  “They were red.”

 

He nodded and then looked down at the bed, lips pursed.  

 

“For fuck’s sake,” she cursed.  “Just fucking tell me.  I am so sick of this shit.”

 

He turned and looked at her, frowning.  “Human ingenuity never fails to surprise me,” he said.  “We try, but in all honesty, we have nothing on the creativity of the human mind.”

 

Paige went cold.  Weeks and weeks of allusions and unanswered questions and she was finally getting somewhere.  “We?”

 

He nodded.  “The Race of Rephaim,” he said.  “Or Rephaite.  Singular.  That is what I am.”

 

She just stared at him.  She listened in horrified silence as he explained.  Explained about the Rephaim.  About Palmerston.  1859.  Veils.  Two hundred years of Scion and the Rephaim harvesting voyants like fall crops.

 

“So you - “ she stared, her voice hoarse with emotion.

 

“Fed on you,” he said, his lips pursing into a thin line.  He looked up and met her eyes.  “The NVD underguards were not fully sighted.  In that situation, they could not possibly tell a significantly weakened dreamwalker from a common augur.  You were not worth pursuing.”

 

“Not when they could have you,” she said woodenly.

 

He shook his head, shamed.  “Scion has produced a great many technological wonders in conjunction with the Rephaim.  One of them is a tincture made from the blood of the Emim.  It distorts the aura.  The underguards knew I was powerful, but nothing more.  They were not aware that I was anything more than a dangerous syndicate member.”

 

She was shaking.  Warden finally admitted that he wasn’t human.  But the truth - the Rephaim, the Emim, Scion.  And he had fed on her, consumed her aura like she was nothing more than sustenance.  She has never felt a betrayal so profound.  He _fed_ on her.  He took her aura, the very thing about her that made her who she was.  And he said he did it for her own good.

 

Paige pushed herself out of the bed.  Every bit of her body protested.  Her side was one fire and her head was pounding.

 

“Please,” Warden said quietly, not moving from the bed.

 

She backed away, shaking her head.

 

“ _Paige!_ ”

 

She turned to see Nick running up a set of stairs.  He stopped at the top, taking in her disheveled appearance, taking in Warden sitting stock still on the bed.

 

“I called him,” Warden said quietly.  “For you.”

 

“ _Sötnos_ ,” Nick said, hurrying to her side, never taking his eyes off Warden.

 

Paige wrapped her arm around Nick’s neck.  “Just get me out of here.  Fast.”

  
  
END CHAPTER


	5. The First Death

Jax locked down the den, which was just fine with Paige.  She wanted nothing more than to hole up, away from NVD patrols, away from Warden.  Jax was pissed.  He’d ranted and raved, demanding to know where both she and Nick had been, not to mention how his mollisher ended up with three cracked ribs in her own territory.  Neither she nor Nick said a word.  Jax’s response had been to lock everyone up until he felt sufficiently pacified.  Except for Nadine.  She still had to busk.

 

Paige’s days blurred together.  She buried Warden’s jacket in the bottom of her armoire, vowing to burn it when she got a chance.  She spent a lot of time in the aether, doing recon for Jax.  Most of it was a waste of time, but she figured that was sort of the point.  Penance.  While checking in on Hector, she brushed against two dreamscapes she hadn’t encountered before.  They reminded her of Warden and left her feeling cold and vaguely nauseated.  Rephaim.

 

Warden said the Rephaim were cloistered in Oxford.  Though she now felt that every bit of information from Warden was suspect.  Who was to say the Rephaim weren’t roaming the streets of SciLo, hunting?  Warden claimed he was an outcast, banished for crimes against the ruling family, though he didn’t make it clear what those crimes were.  Or when they had occurred.  Or really anything that would give her a broader picture of his motivations.  Outcast or not, Warden was still one of them.  He still fed on her.  Like she was a _thing_ , not a person.

 

One thing Warden had been right about was that Jax was a petulant prick.  For two weeks he kept Paige and Nick on opposite schedules.  Paige first thought he did it so he could question them both separately, try and get them to crack.  Then she decided he just did it to be an ass.  

 

And then in typical Jax fashion, his whims turned on a dime.  “Ready for a day on the town, O my lovely?”

 

Paige hadn’t had the fight to even give him hell about it.  After weeks away, she missed the streets like she missed air, like she missed the aether.  She simply said, “Yes.”

 

She kept checking over her shoulder, looking in shadowed doorways.  She expected Warden to appear, but he did not.  Tentatively, she reached out.  Nothing.  He wasn’t there.  As much as Warden didn’t belong in SciLo, she’d grown accustomed to him turning up.  She found the realization unsettling.  

 

Later that evening, in the aether, she looked for him and once again turned up empty.  No Rephaim anywhere in SciLo that she could find.  Maybe he’d taken the tincture again that scrambled his aura.  If he was in that state, she wasn’t sure she could recognize him even if she brushed right up against his dreamscape.  Or maybe he was gone, as randomly as he had arrived.

 

She was exhausted when Dani pulled her back.  Without a word, Paige stumbled up to her room and collapsed on the bed.  She was dimly aware, some hours later, of Nick entering the room.  She scooted over to make space for him as he spooned behind her, his knees tucked tightly behind hers, his arm around her waist.

 

Paige took a deep breath and stared out her window.  It was raining.  She could see rainslicked reflections on the brick wall across the alley, from passing cars.

 

“ _Sotnos_ ,” Nick said quietly.  “Please tell me what happened.”

 

Paige screwed her eyes shut and shook her head.

 

“Did he - “ Nick asked carefully, so carefully it pierced Paige’s heart, “ _hurt_ you?”

 

She released a shuddering breath.  “Not the way you mean,” she said quietly.  What could she say?  No, Warden hadn’t touched her physically.  He never touched her. But he’d fed on her very essence.

 

Nick seemed to take some comfort in her denial and held her tighter.  She should tell Nick.  She should tell him about Warden, about the Rephaim, Oxford, Scion.  Except that she knew what would happen.  He would stare at her like she was mad.  And why shouldn’t he?  She felt mad, even considering that it might be true.  

 

It couldn’t possibly be true.  How could a conspiracy of that magnitude be hidden?  Scion’s entire reason for existing was to root out clairvoyance.  Now Paige was supposed to believe that Scion worked with - _for_ \- a race of inhuman clairvoyants?  It was beyond reason.  Jax would lock her up forever if she so much as breathed a word of this ludicrous idea.

 

* * *

When Paige woke in the morning, Nick was gone.  At work, no doubt, for Scion.  She hated the dangerous game that Jax forced him to play.  But they needed Nick’s income, all of them.  Nick and Dani’s Scion salaries were what sustained them.

 

Paige was sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of unsatisfactorily lukewarm tea when Jax strolled through the room, cigar clamped in his teeth, wearing a grey silk waistcoat that probably cost a month of Nick’s salary.  He was twirling a set of keys around his index finger.

 

“Let’s try this again, shall we,” he said with a poison smile.  “Flat 1H.  Stevie and the boys cleaned up the mess.  Make sure it’s ready to go.  And don’t fuck it up again, honeybee.”

 

He dropped the key into her mug and turned on his heel.  Paige glared daggers at his back.   _Fuck it up again_.  She nearly fucking _died_ on some bullshit errand for him and he was telling her not to fuck it up again.  She slammed the cup down on the table and fished out the keys, mindless of the mess she was making.  She didn’t give a shit if it destroyed the finish on Jax’s precious Louis XV end table.

 

The sun was shining, a dull, yellow light.  The smog was particularly bad and Paige ducked her head, covering much of her mouth with her cravat.  She stood across the street from the building for half an hour, just watching.  It was mid-morning and nothing much was happening.  There were some kids ditching school, a couple of garbage collectors who didn’t try very hard to collect much garbage.  No SVD patrols at all, though they would be congregated in the higher traffic areas at this time of day.

 

Pulling her hat down, she crossed the street.  The foyer still smelled of piss and vomit and ... something else.   _Death_.  Maybe the smell was there before.  Maybe she just didn’t realize what it was.  As a mollisher, she was no stranger to death.  But in her line of work, she tended to frame is as people meeting their karma.  People died.  Voyants died.  She often didn’t do anything to stop it.  But she hadn’t ever really been involved that close up.  She’d never fallen in a pool of someone’s congealing blood.

 

She shivered, standing in the hallway.  She felt hot and cold.  Her palms were sweating.  Her breathing was too fast, too shallow.  This was the job.  This was what it meant to be in the upper echelon of the syndicate.  The cost of doing business.  She couldn’t afford to jump at shadows, especially the ones in her mind.

 

She forced herself to walk down the hallway.  She could feel a cold sweat trickling from the nape of her neck down between her shoulder blades.  A kid, probably eight or nine, burst out of one of the flats and Paige nearly jumped out of her skin.  For a split second, she felt her spirit come loose, but she recovered before she hit the ground.  She stood there, panting.  She would do this.

 

She reached the door and used Jax’s keys.  Slowly, she pushed open the door.  The flat was a shithole.  No amount of cleaning by Stevie and the boys was going to fix that.  Though looking at the gruesome stain in the middle of the floor, Paige wasn’t exactly sure what Stevie and the boys had cleaned up.  The bodies.  Not much else.  The courtiers’ spirits were still lingering close by.  No one had said the threnody.  Paige had no idea what their names were.  She had no way to bring them peace.

 

She walked through the flat.  It was disgusting.  Nobody with any self-respect would stay in a place like this.  Though people with self-respect typically weren’t Jax’s customers.  He tended to feed on the lowest of the low, taking advantage of people when he knew they were too weak to look anywhere else.  Disgusted, Paige locked the flat and left.

 

She was glad to be outside.  There was still no sign of SVD patrols.  She wasn’t in any mood to go back to the den, but she also didn’t have any money.  That limited her options.  Without really considering where she was going, she started walking toward the the abandoned church where Warden apparently stayed.  She’d been lucid enough, when Nick collected her, to note the address.  It was in a really shitty part of the cohort, on Betterton street.  There was no guarantee Warden was still in SciLo at all.  

 

She stared at the exterior of the building.  It was falling to ruin, though she knew from having been inside that most of the roof was in tact.  The doors were chained and boarded over.  Paige knew there was a basement entrance around the side which could be used to access the sanctuary.  She reached out, but at this distance and without actually dislodging her spirit, she didn’t get much.

 

Paige picked her way through the basement and its mounds of trash, carefully.  Partially because she didn’t want to get tetanus and partially because she was in no hurry to see what the sanctuary held - or didn’t hold.  She truly didn’t know if she wanted Warden to be there or not.  Both possibilities were loaded.

 

Paige climbed the rickety stairs, listening to the birds in the rafters.  Crows.  She hated crows.  Two of the animals burst into flight as she finally stepped into the sanctuary.  Everything looked much as it had when Paige had fled with Nick.  

 

Paige crossed the cavernous room to the corner where Warden made his den, _lair_ , she wasn’t sure what to call it.   _Lair_ sounded overwrought, like she was living in a penny dreadful.  And the place looked like a bolthole, somewhere to hide, not some home base from which to plot devious machinations and prey on unsuspecting mollishers.  

 

The bed was unmade, just as it had been when she left.  Paige ventured closer.  The floor and sheets were stained with something that was slightly luminescent in the muted morning light.  It looked old, dried.  It had been there for days.  She touched the glimmering powder and it set her senses on edge.  She quickly brushed it off her hands.  

 

Most of the blankets had fallen off the far side of the bed, between the mattress and the cracked sanctuary wall.  Paige tried to tug them away, to see if there was more staining, but they wouldn’t come loose.  There was a groan of pain from behind the bed.

 

Paige climbed across the bed and stared down into the space between the mattress and the wall.  It looked like a mass of blankets but there was one arm visible.  He was on his left side, back against the wall, his face covered with blankets.

 

“Warden?”

 

Nothing.

 

With a considerable amount of tugging and cursing, - both of which did nothing for her sore ribs -  Paige admitted defeat.  She couldn’t move him.  He was too heavy.  She settled for wedging her back against the wall and her booted feet against the bedframe, pushing with her legs until her thighs shook.  She was able to inch it away from the wall, enough that she had room to pull the blankets away from Warden.

 

She knelt on top of the mattress, one arm against the wall for balance as she stared down at him.  The space between the bed and the wall was shadowy and cramped.  Warden looked like death.  He wasn’t dead.  Point of fact, she didn’t know if he _could_ die.  But he looked terrible.  There was more of a sheen than usual to his skin, sweat. Even without touching him, she could feel the heat radiating off his form.  He was burning up.

 

His black shirt was ripped and what she had initially taken to be torn fabric across his right shoulder was, in fact, flesh.  She’d gagged.  The reek was unbelievable.  His flesh was blackened and festering with what looked like black tongues of poison radiating away from the wound, across what she could see of his upper back and chest.

 

“Warden,” she said, trying to touch him somewhere that didn’t look like it would hurt.  There weren’t many options.  She reached down and shook his left hand, where it lay on the floor near his face.  He didn’t respond.

 

“Warden!” she yelled.  Nothing.

 

Cursing, she grabbed his right arm and shook, hard.  He shouted hoarsely, his body going taut.  He was trembling, his skin slick with perspiration.  “Paige?” he panted, glancing at her.  “Leave,” he said.  “You must leave.”

 

“Don’t tell me what to fucking do,” she snapped.  Her temper was waspishly short.  Plus, she was still pissed at him, though the anger was quickly giving way to fear.  She’d never imagined she could see Warden in a state like this, so wracked with pain that his cryptic veneer burned away leaving nothing but a wounded animal.  Up until this moment, she wasn’t sure she’d ever considered that he was an actual, living creature, capable of death.  “What happened to you?”

 

He shook his head, lips pursed together tightly.  “Go,” he said.  ”The half-urge, Paige.  I will succumb to the madness.  And then death.”

 

Half-urge?  What the fucking fuck?  “Tell me how to help you,” she said.  When he didn’t respond, she grasped his right arm again and shook it, hard.  “Tell me!”

 

“Blood,” he said, looking up at her, his eyes glassy.  “Human blood.”  His eyes fell shut and he grimaced, his body trembling.

 

She looked down at him warily, hands fisted on top of her thighs. “Oh, hell no.”

 

His head lolled and his body spasmed.

 

Paige backed up a few steps.  Blood?  He seriously needed blood?  What the hell was this?  Was he some kind of goddamn vampire?  Was she going to find out that werewolves and fairies were real too?  Maybe she could find a rainbow and a motherfucking pot of gold.  She could call Nick.  Maybe he or Danica could get blood from Scion’s stores.

 

“I’ll find some,” she said.  He didn’t respond.  She shook him again, hard enough that he opened his eyes.  “I’ll find some,” she repeated.  “I’ll call Nick.”

 

He shook his head.  “There is not time,” he said.  “Go, Paige.  And remember that you belong to _no one_.  Not Jaxon Hall.  Not Scion.  You are beholden to none.”

 

She watched as he curled in on himself as much as the space would allow.  Madness and death.  Shit.  She was still so angry with him and this in no way changed that.  But there was so much she still needed to know, so much he still needed to tell her.  She still needed to give him his jacket back.

 

She leaned over him again and then glanced around the room.  If he needed an IV transfusion they were fucked, plus she hated needles  She would make a shit acultomancer.  She shook him.  It took even longer, this time, to rouse him.  When his eyes finally focused on her, she asked, “How?”

 

He blinked up at her, frowning, like he really had to concentrate to understand her words.  “Drink.”

 

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she swore.   Before she could let herself think better of it, she pulled a small pocketknife out of her jacket and used it to cut the inside of her left wrist.  She held it out to him, watching crimson drops spot the sheet.

 

Without a word, he grasped her wrist, pulling it to his mouth.  She turned away as much as she could manage.  She finally settled by sprawling across the bed, face down, her left arm hanging over the edge to Warden.  She turned her head, staring up at the rafters, at the fucking crows.  “You owe me,” she swore, loud enough for him to hear.

 

He stopped drinking.  She felt his lips leave her wrist.  “Yes,” he said quietly.

 

She didn’t look at him.  She didn’t want to see his teeth stained with her blood.  She didn’t know what she expected.  Truthfully, she hadn’t given herself time to expect anything.  But this was nothing like the _Vamps of Vauxhall_.  No gurling, no gnawing, no swooning.  He just lay there, holding her arm.  And she let him.

 

It seemed to take forever.  Apparently she wasn’t a good bleeder.   _Ha!  Take that_.  He finally finished, releasing her wrist.  She watched as he pushed himself up from the floor, moving very slowly, but much better than he was only moments earlier.  She tried to stand.  Immediately, she sat back down.  Without a word, Warden urged her to lay back on the bed.  She looked at him.  He looked better.  Fuck him.

 

She watched as he ripped the sheet, using a long strip of cotton to bind her wrist.  “Are you a vampire?”

 

He pursed his lips, which, thankfully, didn’t appear to be coated in her blood.  “I am a Rephaite.”

 

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

 

“Then to answer your question,” he said.  “ _No_.  I am not a vampire.  I do not need human blood to survive.”

 

“Just human aura.”

 

He inclined his head in conceit.  “Human blood has the ability to heal the bite of an Emite, to fight the necrotic infection it carries for my kind.  Without human blood, the half-urge will take a Rephaite.  It is fatal, among other things.”

 

“I thought that aura tincture you drank was Emim.”

 

“A diluted form of Emim blood,” he said.  “It can disguise an aura.  A bite from an Emite is an entirely different matter.  I do not suggest you try it.”

 

“But it’s not fatal to humans?”

 

“A single bite, no,” he said.  “But Emim can and do kill humans.  And eat them.  Emim will eat any flesh, living or dead.”

 

Paige made a face.

 

“Indeed,” Warden said, frowning down at her.  He lay her bandaged wrist across her chest and slowly made his way over to his armoire.  She watched in silence as he removed a box of salt and a bottle of water.  Tucking them both under his left arm.  He sat down on the mattress next to Paige.

 

She watched as he opened the water bottle and handed it to her.  She took several long drinks and handed the bottle back to him.  He tucked the bottle against his left side and opened the box of salt, carefully pouring the grains into the bottle.  When he was done, he capped the bottle and shook it with his left hand.

 

Carefully, Warden removed what was left of his shirt.  Paige forced herself not to look away.  The bite looked marginally better, but it was still awful.  With a frown, he leaned his right shoulder away from the bed, so it was over the floor rather than the mattress.  Using his left hand, he doused the wound with the saline solution.

 

The muscles corded in his neck and he swayed, sucking his breath between his teeth.  Paige thought he might pass out.  He was still breathing hard, shaking.  He took what remained of the sheet he’d used to bind her wound and pressed it against his shoulder, baring his teeth.

 

Trembling, he fell back on the bed next to her, the sheet still clutched to his shoulder, eyes screwed shut.

 

She looked at him.  “You know, when I imagined both of us swooning in your bed, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

 

He opened his eyes and gave her an unreadable look.  “We would be wise not to imagine it at all,” he said, letting his eyes fall shut again.  “It is forbidden.  An intimate entanglement could cost us both our lives.”

 

Had Paige not been a pint low on blood, she would have stormed out.  As it was, she just gave him the finger, which he at least did her the favor of opening his eyes to see.

 

“No, little dreamer,” he replied.  “That is what I just explained.  We cannot.”

* * *

 

When Paige woke, it was hours later.  The light was beginning to dim with twilight.  Warden was asleep, still clutching the sheet to his wounded shoulder.  She lifted her wrist and studied it.  It was tender, but no longer bleeding.  

 

She pushed herself up on her elbows and then into a sitting position.  Carefully, she inched the sheet away from Warden’s shoulder.  His flesh looked much improved.  It was still gray and patchy in some places, but it no longer looked life threatening or particularly painful.  He’d be fine in another day or two.  He probably needed more aura.  Well, he was going to have to find another voyant to suck glow from.  She was done giving at the office.

 

* * *

 

The last bits of light were just fading as she closed the door to the den, leaning back against it.

 

“I trust everything was in order,” Jax said from the top of the stairs.

 

“Aside from the two souls Stevie left hanging around the flat,” Paige bit back.  “He could have said the threnody.”

 

Jax stepped down a couple stairs and caught her eye.  “London is rife with souls, darling.  What’s a couple more?”

 

Paige shook her head.   Sometimes she hated Jaxon Hall.

 

END CHAPTER


	6. Catch and Release

Paige looked up from her seat behind the table in Jax’s stall at the Garden.  Warden stood there, thankfully more disguised this time than his last appearance at the black market.  He was dressed all in black, but the bespoke suit was gone.  

 

The trousers were heavily textured waxed cotton, hanging low on his lean hips, secured with a black leather belt.  The kind of trousers dock workers wore to keep off the muck and mire.  His boots were likewise industrially appropriate, with a heavy tread and worn laces.  His waistcoat looked time aged and worn.  Delicate black and gray stripes were faded and the metallic buttons were badly tarnished.  He wore a dark gray shirt beneath, secured at the throat with a simple black cravat.  His black jacket was large and shapeless, draping against his body, his head covered by a hood.  She could tell he must have tied his hair back, but much of his face was in shadow.  

 

Being nearly seven feet tall, he was never going to manage ‘inconspicuous’, but this was an improvement.  She was also betting he took some of that tincture.  He felt ... _fuzzy_.

 

“May I interest you some art?” she asked with a fake, gleaming smile.  He was still bad for business.  She needed him to move.

 

He simply stared at her and then handed her a piece of paper.

 

Narrowing her eyes, she took the paper and unfolded it.

 

_Thomas Stanley Dobbins_

_John Aiden Farrell_

 

She looked up at him.

 

“The courtiers,” he said quietly.  “In case you want to say the threnody.”

 

She nodded and tucked the paper inside her pocket.  She had no idea how he found that information.  But he was right.  She did want it.  She did want to put them at rest.  She wasn't ever going to manage to get them entirely out of Warden's old jacket.

 

When she looked up again, he was gone.  She didn’t bother looking for him.  For a giant, he could move like a shadow when he wanted.

 

Eliza came to the front of the booth.  “Any customers?”

 

“Nothing yet,” Paige said.  “But the day is still young.”

 

* * *

“My god,” Nick said, pressing his forearm over his nose.  “This place is a cesspool.”

 

“Tell me about it,” Paige said.  The flat still hadn’t been rented out, which wasn’t a shock considering it smelled like several people had been hacked to death inside it - _which they had_.

 

“Well, let’s get on with it,” Nick said, clearly eager to leave.

 

Paige took out the piece of paper.  “Thomas Stanley Dobbins be gone into the aether.  All is settled.  All debts are paid.  You need not dwell among the living now.”  She felt the first courtier’s spirit draw close and then the soft ethereal hiss as it dissipated.

 

“You know,” Nick said, “violent deaths do make good ‘geists.”

 

“Jesus, Nick,” Paige swore.  “You sound just like Jax.”

 

Nick shook his head.  “I know.  I’m sorry.  Go ahead.”

 

“John Aiden Farrell be gone into the aether.  All is settled.  All debts are paid.  You need not dwell among the living now.”  The second courtier’s spirit glowed softly and then dissolved into the aether.

 

“So much for that,” Nick said, opening the door.  "There's probably only a hundred more spirits hanging around this place after meeting their untimely ends."

 

Paige followed him out into the hallway.  He was right, of course.  As was Jax.  What difference did two spirits put to rest make in the overall picture of SciLo.  She wasn't sure why she'd needed to do this, she only knew that she did.

 

“You said the NVD agents were inside when you got here?” Nick asked.

 

“Yeah,” Paige said, straightening her hat.  “The courtiers must have attracted them.  I was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

 

Nick frowned.  “Does that seem likely, though?  I mean, why would NVD agents bother with a couple of reigning augurs?  Seems more like an SVD issue.  Especially all the way out here.”

 

Paige shook her head.  “I have no idea.  We are still in the central cohort, even if it’s the shitty end.”  Augurs were a dime a dozen, but they were still voyants.  NVD handled voyant roundups.  Nick was right, it didn’t make any sense.  But then again, Scion’s logic never really clicked with Paige.  She held the door to the building for Nick and then fell into step beside him on the sidewalk.  “You think something else was going on?”

 

He shrugged.  “Maybe.  Just seems odd.  Three NVD officers are overkill for those two burnouts.”

 

Paige took a dozen more steps in silence.  “You think they were there for something else?”

 

He looked over at her.  “Or _someone_ else.”  He frowned.  “You’re a mollisher, Paige.  Not exactly low profile.”

 

She laughed, aware she sounded slightly hysterical.  “So you think the NVD has singled me out?”

 

He shrugged.  “Or your friend, maybe.”

 

Paige considered it.  Maybe the NVD had been looking for Warden.  “Who says he was even there?”

 

Nick gave her a withering look.   _“Sotnos_ , don’t lie to me.  It insults my intelligence.  Plus, I picked you up at his crib the next morning.  Broken ribs and all.”

 

Paige frowned and shoved her hands deeper into her pockets.  Scion knew about the Rephaim.  Or at least _some_ of Scion did.  Paige doubted that the average SVD patrol officer had a clue.  But NVD ... maybe.  Was Warden so much on the outs with the rest of his people that they’d send patrols after him?  She didn’t know.  A mollisher or a Rephaite, either one would be a pretty good score for Archon.  “Sooner or later they’re going to be coming for all of us, you know,” Paige said quietly.

 

“Yeah,” Nick said sadly.  “I know.  I received a press release yesterday for RDT.”

 

Paige looked over at him.  “What does it do, exactly?”

 

He shook his head.  “Nothing good, _sotno_ s.  Nothing good.”

 

* * *

“Just in case I wasn’t clear,” Paige said, stepping up the last step into the sanctuary, “you owe me.”

 

Warden was sitting in a chair, looking at a datapad.   He'd ditched the jacket and rolled back the sleeves of his shirt.  “Yes,” he said quietly, “I am aware.”  He put down the datapad and threaded his fingers together, looking at her.  “And what form do you imagine this repayment taking?”

 

Paige gave him a cold smile.  “Answers.”

 

He nodded, apparently having expected those terms.  He motioned toward the bed, the only other place in the room to sit.  He looked rumpled and vaguely dangerous, even seated.  It made Paige’s heart beat faster.  She sat on the bed.

 

“Nick thinks that the NVD patrol at the courtier’s flat wasn’t meant for them.”

 

Warden nodded.  “I had considered that as well.”

 

She leaned back, propping herself up on her elbows as she looked at him.  “So who do you think they were waiting for?”

 

He shook his head.  “I do not know.  But it is possible they were there for either or both of us.  I am an outcast among the Rephaim and you are Jaxon Hall’s mollisher.”

 

She arched an eyebrow.  “So you don’t think Jax is behind this?”  That was a first.

 

He took a deep breath.  “I do not have any reason at this point to think that Jaxon Hall is aware of my presence in the citadel.  And while I believe him to be capable of anything, I do not believe he would willingly turn over his dreamwalker to anyone, for any price.  You, he covets most highly among all his treasures.”

 

Paige pushed herself back up, glaring.  “Jax doesn’t covet me.”

 

Warden looked at her, his expression stony.

 

She stood, pacing.  “So for sake of argument, let’s assume they wanted me.   _Why_?”

 

“You are an incredibly powerful voyant, Paige.  Is that not reason enough?  By simply existing you have committed a crime in Scion's eyes.”

 

She stopped pacing and stared at him.  “They could have just wanted me,” she admitted.  “But what aren’t you saying?”

 

He took a deep breath and stood up from the chair.  Paige instinctively took a step back despite the fact that there was at least a dozen feet of space between them.

 

“I told you about the Rephaim,” Warden said, looking down at her.  “I told you about their arrangement with Archon, how they use Scion to collect voyants for the penal colony.”

 

Paiged nodded, crossing her arms over her chest.  It was still too fantastical to believe.  And she wasn’t crazy about how he was discussing the Rephaim in the third person, like he wasn’t one of them.

 

“The Rephaim need voyants,” Warden said.  “Without voyant auras, the Rephaim would starve.”  His lips pursed into a thin line.  “In the penal colony, voyants are trained to do the bidding of the Rephaim, to fight the Emim.”

 

Paige looked away.  “Yeah, you already told me this.”

 

“The ruling family,” he continued, “the Sargas.  They are the ones who forged the agreement with Palmerston two centuries ago.  There are always two, a male and a female.  Gomesia and Nashira Sargas.”

 

The coldness in the way he said their names caused Paige to shiver.  Whatever history lay between Warden and his people, it was bad.  Very, very bad.  She shook off the feeling.  “So there’s some psycho couple running the Rephaim show.  What does that have to do with me?”

 

He smiled tightly.  “Not a couple, Paige.   _Family_.  Kin.  The Rephaim ruling family always has two sovereigns, related, but not mated.  That would be incestuous.  Gomesia is one of the blood-sovereigns.  He spends most of his time at the Archon, keeping Scion under his thumb.  But the other - ”

 

“Nashira,” Paige said, taking note of the way Warden flinched at the sound of her name.

 

“Yes,” he said coldly, “Nashira.  She is directly in charge of the penal colony.”

 

Paige was at a loss, though she did understand he was attempting to tell her something.  “And what?” she demanded.  “She wants _me_?”

 

He closed his eyes, standing still as a statue.  When he opened them, she swore she saw pain.  “Yes, Paige,” he said quietly.  “Nashira Sargas wants you.”  He turned away, pacing away from her, across the sanctuary.  “Nashira collects voyants, collects their powers, makes them her own and chains their spirits to her for eternity.”

 

Paige stared at him.  “That’s not possible.”

 

“Trust me,” he said quietly, “it is.  She has long sought a dreamwalker.  If she has learned of your existence, there is little she would not do to possess you.”

 

Paige shook her head.  “This is insane,” she said.  “ _Insane_.”

 

He pursed his lips together.  “Indeed,” he said.  “And, yet, still true.”

 

She wrapped her arms around her middle, pacing away from him, needing the distance.  “And how do you know this?” she demanded. “You said you’ve been on the outs with them for years.  How do you know so much about what Nashira wants with me?”

 

He looked down at the floor and then back up at her.  “You demand answers, Paige Mahoney, and I know that they will not make you happy.”

 

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?  Answer the damn question.”

 

He smiled tightly.  “I am familiar with Nashira Sargas’ methods because I spent two hundred years as her consort.”

 

END CHAPTER


	7. Eye for an Eye

“Your ... _consort_ ,” Paige said dully, blinking at Warden.  She blinked.  “ _Consort_?”

 

“To be precise,” he said darkly, “I was _her_ consort.”

 

Paige shook her head, taking another step back.  Warden and some psycho named Nashira - _who wanted to murder her and steal her powers_ \- had been a couple for two hundred years?  Warden took a step toward her and Paige immediately danced back out of his reach, one hand in front of her, warding him off.  “Oh, no,” she said.  “No, no, no.  You don’t get to touch me.”

 

“I was not going to touch you,” he said flatly.

 

Paige glared at him.  She wasn’t sure that was true, _forbidden_ or not.  Who was going to see them in some abandoned church in the ass end of the central cohort?  But she wasn’t going to get distracted.  “Your consort?” she said again, more firmly.

 

He frowned and took a deep breath.  “Rephaim are not humans, Paige.  I have tried to explain that fact.  The blood-sovereigns choose their own mates, not the other way around.  That is our way.”

 

She lifted one hand to her face and pinched the bridge of her nose.  She didn’t get migraines.  At least she didn’t think she did.  She might be getting one now.  “So you think perhaps it’s possible that the NVD patrol slaughtered those courtiers and waited for me on the orders of your soul-stealing ex-girlfriend?”

 

“I do not know,” he said, growling in frustration.  “It is possible.  Anything is possible.  They could have been there for me.”

 

She stared at him, feeling cold all over.  “But they probably weren’t, were they?” she asked quietly.  “They were probably there for _me_.”

 

He scrubbed his hand over his face in a thoroughly human gesture.  “That is what I fear, yes.”

 

She shook her head, wrapping her arms around her middle as she faced him.  “Why do you fear it, Warden?” she demanded.  “Why would it make any difference to a Rephaite what happens to one lowly _human_?  It is forbidden for us to even touch.  How did you end up in my life?   _Why_?”

 

He stared at the floor for so long that Paige was afraid he wasn’t going to answer.  Then he took a deep breath and moved to the bed, taking a seat on the edge.  “More questions with answers you will not like.”

 

“Fuck you!” she snapped.  “You don’t have a clue what I like.  But I’ll let you know I really fucking hate being lied to.”

 

He looked across the sanctuary at nothing.  “I was Nashira’s consort for approximately one hundred and eighty of your years.”

 

“ _My_ years?”

 

He looked at her.  “Rephaim do not experience time in human terms.  We are eternal.  I am trying to provide you with a frame of reference.”

 

“Fine,” she said, sitting down on the bed, a good distance from him.  “Fine.  A hundred and eighty years of face sucking bliss.  What next?”

 

“I betrayed her,” he said flatly.

 

Paige looked at him.  He smiled mirthlessly.

 

“I intended to kill her,” he said evenly.  “To get the voyants in the penal colony back to London.  I intended ... many things.”

 

Paige watched him, noting the way regret played across his features, though she didn’t think any of it was for his murderous intentions toward his former betrothed.  “And it didn’t work,” she guessed.

 

He shook his head.  “The betrayers were betrayed.  One human went to Nashira and exposed our plans in exchange for freedom.  My conspirators and I were tortured.  I was branded a blood-traitor.”  He took a deep breath.  “All of the humans in the penal colony were killed.  Nashira let the Emim overrun and devour them.  All because I failed, because I trusted someone who was not worthy of that trust.”

 

Paige reached a hand out toward him and then immediately pulled it back.  “What did you do?” she asked.  “After?”

 

“I fled when the opportunity presented itself,” he said, looking at the floor.  “I ran.  I was badly injured.  Nashira tortured me.  My co-conspirators were tortured as well.  Some of them paid for my folly with their lives.”

 

Paige sat there trying to take it all in.  “And so what now?” she asked quietly.  “You’ve decided to help me because you think your ex wants to kill me?”

 

He laughed mirthlessly, looking down at the floor.  “Oh, if only it were so noble,” he said.  He glanced at her.  “No,” he said.  “After my failure, my torture, my betrayal, I was not inclined to make reparations of any kind.”

 

She straightened up, looking at him carefully.  Warden, in her experience, was ... _annoying_.  And helpful.  And frustrating as fuck.  But she had seen glimpses of his other side.  She remembered his eyes, glowing red with the fire of her aura.  She had grown somewhat inured to his presence, but she forced herself to acknowledge that he was dangerous.  And she truly had no idea what he was capable of.

 

He sighed, threading his fingers together again.  “I hunted,” he said quietly.  “Once I had recovered enough, I hunted my betrayer.”

 

“The human,” Paige said.  “The one who escaped.”

 

Warden nodded.  “And I found him.”  He looked at Paige.  “And I ... watched.”

 

She swallowed thickly.  “For how long?”

 

“Years,” he said flatly.  “Rephaim are eternal.  I had time.  I waited.”

 

She was certain she didn’t want the answer to this question, but she had to ask.  “Waited for what?”

 

He looked away again, across the sanctuary.  “I waited for him to love something.  I waited for him to _covet_.”

 

Paige stood up and took several steps back away from the bed.  Warden didn’t look at her.  He just sat there, hunched forward, fingers threaded together, staring across the sanctuary.  Paige pulled her knife out of her jacket, opening the blade and palming it.  The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and her breathing had gone shallow and fast.

 

Warden turned and looked at her and Paige was hyper aware of the way his eyes glowed.  “I watched you for years,” he said quietly.  “I watched him mold and manipulate you.  I realized what you were, what Jaxon Hall was doing.”  He fell silent, taking a breath and looking away again.  “I saw, that night.  You in the roof garden with Dr. Nygard.  I knew Jaxon Hall's shining jewel was wounded, vulnerable.”

 

Paige’s breathing was ragged.  She was aware of the bright blush of embarrassment across her cheeks.  She could feel her spirit beating at the edge of her dreamscape.

 

With what Paige was certain were deliberately slow motions, he stood, turning to face her.  His hair had come loose from its tie, falling across his right eye.  “I followed you that night,” he continued, his voice a bare whisper.  “I watched you with that boy.”

 

She forced herself to breathe.  Her tongue wet her dry lips.  The hilt of the knife was digging into her palm.  “What were your ... _intentions_?”

 

“Don’t be delicate, Paige,” he said quietly.  “Jaxon Hall betrayed me.  He sold out every human in the prison colony for his freedom.  His words cost me my status, my freedom, my chance to destroy the Sargas.  I was tortured.  I watched my friends murdered.  You know what I intended.  To strike as deeply at Jaxon Hall as he struck at me.”

 

Paige was slowly inching backwards.  Her palms were sweating and her spirit was pushing against the edge of her dreamscape so hard that she was seeing spots.

 

As she watched, he wordlessly started unbuttoning his waistcoat.  His actions were precise, deliberate.  He dropped the waistcoat to the floor.  He removed the cravat with one swipe and then unbuttoned his shirt.  She watched in silence as he shrugged the shirt off his shoulders and slowly turned.

 

She gasped.  She couldn’t help it.  She watched as he dropped to his knees, facing away from her.  The _scars_.  Holy fuck, the _scars_.  Unconsciously, she took several steps forward.  They were ‘giest scars, the worst she’d ever seen.  Worse than she ever could have imagined possible.  The scars on her own palm were a pale shadow of the horrors carved into his skin.  She knew he was inhuman, powerful.  But for him to have survived an attack like that - No human could have lived.  The wounds looked like tongues of fire, deep welts and puckers etched into his immortal flesh, overlapping, twisting.  Even now, decades later, they had to be incredibly painful.  They would never heal.  Not as long as Nashira commanded her poltergeist.

 

“The points where Rephaim flesh is most closely aligned with the physical world are the most vulnerable,” he said quietly.  “Heel, knee, hand,” he continued.  “Those are the points where we can be wounded.”  He paused, not looking over his shoulder, but turning slightly toward her, enough that she could see his profile.  “But I warn you, we tend to die very hard.  Even those of us who are scarred.  The poppy anemone is far more efficient, if you can find any.”

 

Paige looked down at the knife in her hand.  “What stopped you?” she demanded.  “Why didn’t you hurt me?”

 

He simply knelt there, his face turned away.

 

“Answer me!” she yelled, her chest heaving with her breath.

 

“You looked up at me,” he said quietly.  “And you were unafraid.”  

 

She stood there, shaking, staring at his back, at the way his head bowed as if in defeat.  Rephaim died hard.  That’s what he said.  But he stood there, awaiting her fury, making no attempt to defend himself.  She probably couldn't kill him.  But she could try.

 

He took a deep breath.  “I had never touched a human.  Not once in two centuries.  I fed on them, I hurt them when I had no alternative.  But I had never touched one.  Not until that night.”

 

She waited, rooted to the spot.

 

“You were so ... fragile,” he said.  “And so alive.”  He shook his head.  “We Rephaim believe ourselves superior.  We believe we are the first, the true guardians of the aether.  We believe we must guide or rule or crush humanity, that you cannot be trusted with free will.”  He stopped, as if searching for words.  “But when I touched you - “

 

Slowly, he turned to face her, still kneeling.  “For the first time, I questioned whether or not a sarx creature, a Rephaite, who is not born, who is not subject to the passage of time.  For the first time I questioned if such a creature can ever truly live.”  

 

Apparently deciding she wasn’t going to stab him in the back, at least not literally, he sank to the ground, facing her.  “You are so finite, but you are ... _alive_.  You reminded me what it means to live, rather than existing.”

 

Paige took a deep breath and shook her head, trying to make sense of it all.  “So you let me live,” she said.  “You decided that rather than killing me, you’d just convince me to leave Jax.”

 

He bowed his head again, pulling his knees up and wrapping his arms around them.  “Not to hurt Jaxon Hall,” he said quietly.  “ _For you_.  You have so much fire, Paige.  You should not be beholden to anyone, least of all Jaxon Hall.  You deserve far more than to simply be one more weapon in his arsenal.”

 

“Says the Rephaite who planned to kill me,” she replied bitterly.

 

He nodded, still staring at the floor.  “A valid point, I grant you that.”

 

She shook her head, backing up.  “I don’t care how hard you die,” she spat.  “If you come near me again, I will end you.”

 

She turned and ran.

 

END CHAPTER


	8. The Mourning Star

Paige was still shaking when she got back to the den.  Nadine was there, in the front room.

 

“What’s wrong with you?” Nadine snapped, scowling.

 

“Fuck you,” Paige said, turning and heading up the stairs.  In her room, she stripped out of her clothes.  They were cold and sweaty and stuck to her body.  She threw on an ancient bathrobe and headed down the hall.  The shower cubicle was small and disgusting, but the water was hot.  She sank to the floor and sat there until the tap ran cold.  

 

She was still holding her knife.

 

* * *

“It is a glorious day,” Jaxon announced, smiling broadly, cigar clamped between his back teeth.  

 

Paige stared at him.  He was half-drunk.  He’d been with Minty most of the afternoon, drinking absinthe and wine and god only knew what else.  “Really?” Paige asked.  “You and the other mime-lords figure out what to do about Scion’s new RDT initiative?”

 

Jax scowled.  “I will not discuss such plebian concerns today.”  He squeezed her cheek, hard, and then gave her a slap.  The warning was clear.

 

Fucking christ.   _Plebian concerns_.  They were all going to end up in the fucking Tower and Jax just wanted to make sure that no one fucked up his buzz.  She listened, along with the other Seals, as Jax outlined his grand plan to pull one over on Didion.  Another idiot scuffle, scrapping with another mime-lord over some goddamned spirit that no one had any good use for.  Scion was coming for them.  The Rephaim were coming for them.  And Jaxon was busy holding court.  And drinking.  He’d been drinking a lot lately.  Like he didn’t have a care in the world.

 

As soon as Paige could get away, she did.  She didn’t know how to interact with Jax.  She didn’t know what she believed.  According to Warden, Jax had been a prisoner in the Rephaim’s penal colony.  How could that possibly be true?  Paige shook her head, ducking into a coffee shop.  She ordered a saloop and found a table in the corner.

 

She considered her feelings toward Jaxon Hall.  He was an ass.  He was self-centered, self-serving and generally a prick.  He was, without a doubt, the smartest person she had ever met.  Words in his mouth were deadly weapons.  He had absolutely no compunctions about manipulating or sacrificing people to get what he wanted.  So far, that fit with Warden’s description of a man who betrayed hundreds to save his own life.

 

But there was more to Jaxon than that.  He took her in.  He gave her a home, a purpose.  He mentored her.  He protected her.  Even when her own gifts scared her, Jaxon encouraged her, pushing her to test her limits.  He reveled in her power.  He entrusted her with his secrets, his responsibilities.  He gave her status and respect, the title of mollisher.  

 

Paige understood that most of Jaxon’s kindness toward her was ultimately self-serving.  She accepted that.  But not all of it was a game.  She knew that truth.  She felt it, in her bones.  There was a center to Jaxon, a center that cared and protected, even if his ideas were a bit warped.  And for the life of her, Paige could not imagine Jaxon Hall as anybody’s slave.

 

Maybe if she just explained the situation to Jax.  Maybe she could find a way to let him know about the Rephaim without exposing her relationship with Warden.  She had to do something.  If half of what Warden said was true, they couldn’t just sit around waiting for the world to fall down around them.

 

* * *

 

Jax was sitting at his desk, thumbing through a ledger.  Paige leaned against the doorframe and knocked one knuckle against the wood.

 

“Yes, my little protege?” he asked with offhand casualness.  He seemed irritated and bored.  Paige expected being as smart as he was must be its own kind of challenge.  The daily struggle to keep insanity at bay.

 

“I found something,” she said quietly.  “Last night.  When I was scouting.”

 

He arched an eyebrow and pointed to one of the chairs across from his desk.  “Do tell, sweeting.”  He gave her a tight, false smile.

 

She took a deep breath.  “I felt two new minds last night,” she said carefully.  “I’ve never felt anything like them before.”  That lie slid out easier than most.

 

He closed the ledger and leaned back in his chair, studying her.  He reached for his cigar, clamping it between his teeth.  “What did they feel like?” he asked.  He wasn’t a dreamwalker.  He was a binder.  But he’d spoken enough with Paige about her gifts that he had a very good idea of how it work.

 

She shook her head.  “Dark,” she said.  She frowned.  “Voyant dreamscapes typically feel warm, glowing.  These were different.”

 

He frowned, removing the cigar.  “Maybe a couple of unreadables,” he said.  “That could be interesting.”

 

Paige shook her head.  “No,” she said.  “They didn’t feel like Zeke.  They were ... _massive_.  But dark.  Cold.  I couldn’t really get anything off them at all.”

 

Jax stared at her for a long moment, eyes narrowing.  “Where were they?’

 

“North,” she said.  I’m not sure where.  I went farther than usual, trying to get a read on them.”

 

His eye twitched.  

 

And then in the space of a heartbeat, that shark smile was back.  “Probably Hector,” he said smoothly.  “Nothing to worry about, honeybee.  He’s just trying to throw us off our game.”  He leaned forward, still smiling.  “But do keep an eye on them,” he said.  “You know the rules, any new arrivals have forty-eight hours to announce themselves.  In the meantime, you find out all you can.”

 

Paige nodded, schooling her face into an expression of mild interest, all the while feeling like ice inside.  “Do you think it could be Scion?” she asked.

 

He shrugged with apparent lack of concern.  “I doubt those bumblers could manage anything that could throw my little mollisher.  More likely one of our rivals.  Investigate, dolly.  Report back.”

 

With another nod, she stood.

 

She walked down the hall to her room and closed the door, leaning back against it.  

 

_Jax knew._

 

Jax knew about the Rephaim.

 

And he wasn’t going to do a damn thing about it.

 

* * *

“ _Sotnos_!” Nick said, hopping over the back of the couch and running to Paige.  She winced as he lightly grabbed her face and tilted her head toward the light, examining her right eye.

 

“It’s fine,” she said.  “Nothing.”

 

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” Eliza said, standing on tiptoe to try and get a good look at what would undoubtedly become a fantastic bruise.

 

“Someone please explain to me, “ Jaxon said, his voice low and dangerous, “how it is that my mollisher continues to be damaged while roaming _her own turf_.”

 

“It was Mag,” Paige said without bothering to look at Jax.  “Pissed about the money I took from him at tarocchi last week.”

 

“You’re a fucking _mollisher_ , dolly.  Do try and act like one.” Jax spat, clearly disgusted.  “We cannot have these second level voyants thinking they can push you around, even if they do work for our worthless underlord.  You are, by definition, an extension of _me_.”  He bared his teeth again in one of his shark smiles.

 

“Yeah, I’ll try and remember your rep next time I’m getting my ass kicked,” Paige snapped.  Wincing again as Nick gently probed her orbital bone with his fingertip.

 

“ _Do_ ,” Jaxon said darkly.  “Sting little honeybee, like the fighter you are.  If you don’t, someone else will.”  With that, he turned and headed up the stairs.  

 

“What’s his fucking problem?” Paige asked under her breath.

 

“He has a point,” Nadine snapped.

 

Paige pushed Nick aside, glaring at Nadine.  “Fuck you, _hisser_ ,” she spat.  “You’re only here because of Zeke.”

 

“ _Paige_ ,” Nick said in a warning tone, pulling her toward the kitchen.  He closed the door quietly and directed her to sit in a chair.  She watched as he pulled an icepack out of the freezer and handed it to her.  “You shouldn’t antagonize Nadine like that,” he said quietly.

 

“Why?” Paige snapped.  “Because she’s fucking Jax?”

 

Nick frowned, but Paige took note of the fact that he didn’t deny her accusation.  “Because Nadine wants your job,” Nick said.  “And because she occasionally is left alone with your body while your soul is in the aether.”

 

Okay, so he certainly had a point there.  “Like Jax would let a fuckin hisser be his mollisher,” Paige muttered, holding the icepack to her eye.  She sighed, sinking back in the chair.  Fuck, her face hurt.  “Do you think I’m a shitty mollisher?” she asked quietly.

 

Nick looked down at her.  “I think you’re brilliant.”

 

She looked at him.  “You didn’t actually answer my question.”

 

He took a seat at the table next to her.  “I think you were an unconventional choice,” Nick said.  “But Jaxon Hall is not a conventional man.  You’re a dreamwalker.  No one in the dials has ever even seen a dreamwalker before.”

 

“I’m a fucking freakshow.”

 

Nick frowned.  “You have so much potential, Paige.  That’s what Jaxon sees.  Besides he isn’t Hector.  He doesn’t go in for the obvious.  He prefers the fine point of a pen to a knife.  It was an easy choice for him to make you his mollisher.”

 

Paige frowned and immediately regretted it as it made her eye throb.  She didn’t know what to think.  About anything.  Jaxon did prefer the fine point of a pen.  Especially since it was so easy to slip between his victim’s ribs when he stabbed them in the back.

 

* * *

Paige was beyond exhausted.  In the two weeks since Mag had nearly broken her orbital bone, Jax had her running all over the cohort, attending to her duties.  It was ridiculous.  She collected rent, chased off a gang of pickpockets, drop off drafts of a new pamphlet with Alfred and generally spent all her time from dawn to dusk fetching and carrying for Jax.

 

That was her job, she realized.  But it chafed now in ways that it hadn’t previously.  The simple fact that she was a mollisher didn’t sustain her as it once had.  Especially when she got to be t _he face of the White Binder_ while Jaxon Hall himself hadn’t been outside the den in weeks.  Paige would think he was hiding, but she couldn’t imagine Jaxon hiding.  From anything.  Maybe the absinthe was just rotting his brain, amplifying his paranoia.  She had no idea how he could drink as much as he did and still function at all.

 

She opened the door to the den quietly, relieved that no one was in the front room.  She took the stairs slowly, careful to avoid the boards that creaked.  The fucking auction had lasted most of the night.  And she didn’t get the damn ghost that Jax wanted.  He was going to be pissed.  She tried to sneak past his boudoir.

 

“A moment, my Paige.”

 

She groaned inwardly and took a step back, to his doorway and pushed the door open.  It was dark, the only light a faint glow from the end of his cigar.  The room smelled disgusting.  She was almost glad there was no light so she couldn’t see what a mess he truly was.  “What Jax?”

 

“Did you manage to acquire Ms. Sherington from our friend Didion?”

 

 _Fuck_.  “No,” she said quietly, steeling herself for his rage.

 

But he didn’t rage, he just sighed and shifted.  She could tell he was on the chaise.  A book fell, crashing to the floor and it sounded like it had run into an empty bottle.  Or two.  Shaking her head, she fumbled for his desk lamp and turned it on.  The room was immediately bathed in jewel toned light reflecting through the stained glass shade.

 

“Abhorrent child,” he swore, covering his eyes with his arm.

 

“Fucking hell, Jax,” Paige cursed, grimacing.  He looked like death warmed over, pasty pale, bloodshot eyes.  He’d been wearing those clothes for days and it smelled like it.  She reached over and picked up the wine bottles.  They were empty, of course.  She picked up the book and looked at it.  It was a gigantic tome.  Old.  

 

“ _Canaanite Religion_?” she read, arching an eyebrow at him.  He had a lot of oddities in his library, but this was a first.

 

He waved her away, but she stood her ground.  He finally sighed and lowered his arms.  “Do you know anything about the morning star, my mollisher?” he asked quietly.

 

She stared at him, scared.  This wasn’t Jax.  “I don’t - “ she started and then fell silent.  “No, I haven’t.  Morning star?  Like astronomy?”

 

He shrugged.  His eyes were still glassy and she wondered if he’d had more than just the booze.  “The term is occasionally used to refer to the planet Venus,” he said.  “But more than that.  The mythology behind it.”

 

She shook her head, setting the book on his desk and going to stand near the chaise.  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Jax.  You’re drunk.  You need sleep.  And a shower.”

 

He blinked up at her and she had the odd sensation that he was seeing her for the first time in weeks.  “Do you remember your mother, honeybee?”

 

Paige immediately took a step back.  “You know I don’t, Jax,” she said.  

 

He looked away and nodded.  “Yes,” he said quietly.  “I remember.”

 

She shook her head and turned.  She closed his door behind herself.

 

* * *

Paige lay on her bed, staring at her ceiling.  She could feel Jaxon’s aura, muddled and ... _raw_.  Jaxon had never been precisely stable.  He was a mercurial creature.  But lately he’d been so strange.  Or was it just her suspicions that were coloring her perception of him?  

 

She didn’t know.

 

She waited until Jaxon’s aura dimmed to sleep.  Or unconsciousness.  It was impossible to tell if he actually fell asleep or if he just passed out.

 

Paige needed sleep, badly.  But she needed other things more.  She needed a touchstone and she had none.  Not Nick.  Not Jax.  The unshakeable parts of her life were shaken.  And she was lost.  She curled onto her side and waited for sleep to take her.

  
  


END CHAPTER


	9. Shelter

“Run, sotnos!   _Run_!”

 

Paige leapt, nearly falling as her booted feet fought for purchase on the decaying rooftop.  She caught herself and sprinted away as fast as she could.  She glanced over her shoulder.  Nick was there, on the adjacent rooftop, keeping pace.  He was a far better climber than she, but she had better endurance.  

 

The NVD officers had split up, one of them after Paige, the other two after Nick.  Paige vaulted over a firewall and scrambled up a tiled incline.  The NVD officer kept pace.  Paige could see the divide gaping ahead of her.  There had to be a twenty-five foot gap between buildings.  She could feel the NVD officer’s aura receding as he slowed.  She sprinted ahead as fast as she could.  She jumped into nothing, arms and legs clawing the air as she fell.  

 

She hit the rusting fire escape on the far building, hard, landing two stories below where she started.  The impact nearly knocked her unconscious and for a moment, she thought she might have broken her ankle again.  But she couldn’t afford to stop.  She kicked through the glass window and dragged herself inside the flat.

 

The NVD officer, wisely, didn’t follow.   The upscale flat was empty.  Paige hoped to god there wasn’t a security alarm.  There probably was.  She was limping heavily, but still moving.  She made it to the hallway and headed for the cargo elevator.  The building was huge, a mixed residential and commercial space favored by university hipster artist types.  She dragged herself inside the elevator and slammed her palm against the button for the basement.

 

Minutes later, she watched through the barred basement windows as the NVD agents regrouped in front of the building.  They looked winded, frustrated and they didn’t have Nick.  Paige’s heart soared.

 

* * *

“It’s Dreamer,” Paige said quietly into the phone.  “Is Vision there?”

 

There was a pause on the other line.  “ _No_.  He’s with you.”

 

Paige swore and slammed the phone down.  Where the fuck was Nick?  She’d searched the area, but she couldn’t find him.  She was relatively certain the NVD officers didn’t have him, but where could he have gone?   _Fuck_!  Her heart was hammering.  If anything happened to Nick -

 

She knew what she had to do.  Nick would be so pissed, but she had no other options.  She found a deserted alley, half a block from where she'd last seen Nick.  The alley was dark and disgusting, but it would do.  She squeezed herself into a space between a dumpster and the wall.  She hadn’t ever walked without life support, but she didn’t have time for anything else.  She had to find Nick and she had to find him now.  If she could find him quickly enough, it would be okay.  It had to be okay.

 

* * *

The aether, as usual, was quiet, peaceful even.  In the aether, she too was sighted.  And she could move fast.  Her spirit danced from voyant to voyant, searching for the familiar warm glow of Nick.  She found him.  In a moment, her silver cord slammed her back in her body.

 

She was gasping, her vision spotty.  She had no idea how long she’d been out.  A minute.  Maybe two.  Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet.  She was unsteady, but she could stand.  Limping heavily, she made her way to the building  and  jimmied open the door.  She headed for the stairs.  

 

She found Nick at once, curled in the space between an old radiator and a cleaning cart in a disused stairwell.  

 

“Nick,” she said, dropping to her knees, shaking his arm.

 

He didn’t respond.  He was trembling all over, sweat pouring off his body.  She could feel his dreamscape.  It felt .. _bad_ ; twisting and puckering like a limb caught in a wringer.  She started patting him down, searching for injuries.  She found the dart.  She pulled it out of his shoulder and stared at it, fear tearing at her heart.  Oh fuck.   _Oh fuck_.  

 

It was a Flux dart.

 

* * *

“What the fuck do you mean you can’t do anything?” Paige raged at Dani.

 

Jaxon put his arm up to stop Paige throttling the engineer.  He pulled Paige into his arms, pinning her to his chest, much more captive than comfort.  All the Seals were crammed into the kitchen, around the table where Nick was laid out, shivering and spasming uncontrollably.  His dreamscape bubbled and fizzed like a toxic waste dump.

 

“I’m a fucking _engineer_ ,” Dani spat.  “They don’t let us play with psychotic drugs.  Or their antidotes.”

 

Paige twisted around, grabbing the lapels of Jaxon’s brocade robe and slamming him back against the wall.  “We’ve got to do something.”

 

Jaxon backhanded her so hard she saw stars and tasted blood.  She was sprawled on the floor, staring up at her mime-lord.  He was shockingly stronger than he looked.  Meaner too.

 

He glared down at her as he straightened his robe.  “We will do something,” he said tightly.  “First and foremost, _we will not panic_.  It is unbecoming.”

 

Paige wiped her split lip with the back of her hand.  Sitting on the floor, she could see Nick’s foot twitching uncontrollably over the edge of the table.  His dreamscape was poisoned and acrid.  He was starting to moan and cry.

 

“Danica,” Jaxon said firmly, “you will go back to your lab at Scion and you will try your damndest to get ahold of the antidote.”

 

Dani just gaped at him.  “How the hell am I -”

 

“No excuses!” Jaxon snapped.  “Losing the Red Vision is not an option.”  He looked at Eliza and Nadine.  “You two, go see that gallipot on Charing Cross Road, the one who specializes in rotties.  Get as much tincto as the little rodent has squirreled away.  Hurt him if you have to.”

 

“What’s tincto supposed to do for Nick?” Eliza asked, incredulous.  Her sugar curls were all wilted and it looked like she'd spent the better part of the week in a trance.

 

“Nothing for the Flux,” Jaxon admitted.  “But perhaps we can use it to sedate him.  I, for one, don’t want to listen to the screams.”

 

Paige got to her feet and seriously contemplated stabbing Jaxon.  She didn’t get a chance.

 

“And you, my morose mollisher,” he said, all teeth.  “You are off to see your beloved father.”

 

Paige blinked at him.  “My father?”

 

Jaxon sighed, like an impatient adult forced to deal with an idiot child.  “He is a forensic pathologist, yes?” he said, knowing full well that was her father’s occupation.  “He’s supposed to be discovering the cause of voyancy.  Surely he has some access to Flux and its antidote.”

 

Paige shook her head.  “At his lab, maybe, but he’s not - “

 

“Well,” Jaxon said, sniffing.  “If you’d prefer that our beloved oracle die - “

 

“I’m going, I’m going,” Paige said.  She didn’t bother looking back.  She just headed for the door.  She hailed a buck cab at the end of the block.

 

“Where to?” the driver asked.

 

Paige sat there for a moment.  She couldn’t go to her father, despite Jaxon's edict.  She just couldn’t.  Jax was right, her father's research did center around the cause of clairvoyance.  Even if he didn’t have access to Flux, it had to be readily available in his lab.  But there was no way she could ask him for it, not without having to admit why she needed it - having to admit that _she_ was a voyant.  With voyant friends.  Criminals, no less.

 

The revelation would break his heart at the very least.  It would probably disappoint and disgust him as well.  If by some miracle her father listened, and didn't immediately call the NVD to have her taken to the Tower, there was no way he could smuggle the drugs out of his office.  She couldn’t put him in that kind of danger.  She couldn’t do that, not even for Nick.

 

“Betterton Street,” she said, leaning back in the seat.

  


* * *

Warden was sitting in his chair, dressed all in black, trousers, waistcoat and shirt.  As she ascended the stairs, he put down his book and rose to his feet.  He crossed the sanctuary toward her, but stopped a good distance away.  His gaze went to her lip, which was still swelling and had yet to quit bleeding.  She noticed the way his eyes flared, though he said nothing.

 

“I need the antidote for Fluxion 14,” Paige said baldly.  “For Nick.”

 

Warden nodded.

 

“That is you, right?” Paige bit out.  “The Rephaim and Scion, together?  Poisoning voyants?”

 

Warden nodded.  “Yes,” he said.  “It is.”

 

“I need the antidote and I need it now.”  She was shaking.  It killed her to come to him, to ask him for help.  But she had nowhere else to turn.

 

“How long since it was administered?” Warden asked.

 

“ _Administered_ ,” Paige repeated acidly.  “Shot.  Nick was shot, _like a feral dog_ , about three hours ago.  By NVD agents.”

 

“There is time then,” Warden said softly.  He looked around the sanctuary.  “Will you wait here?” he asked.  “It will take me some time to procure the antidote.  And it is probably best if I do not deliver it to the White Binder’s den.”

 

Paige nodded, on the verge of tears.  She didn’t know what she’d expected.  Warden had a bed, a chair and salt.  She didn’t know why she’d thought he might have Flux antidote on hand.

 

He reached out toward her and then stopped himself as she flinched.  “I will be back as quickly as possible,” he said.

 

She stood there, listening to him go.  Dully, she walked across the sanctuary to his bed and sat down heavily.  It was nearing midnight.  She was exhausted, mentally and emotionally, as well as physically.  Dislodging her spirit without the use of life-support had been necessary, but it had an exceptionally high cost.  She lay down on Warden's bed, curling into a ball on her side.  She’d slept here before, more than once. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

 

Warden hadn’t bothered her in weeks.  She had promised to kill him if she saw him again, but even at that, she was shocked he stayed away.  But he had.  He respected her wishes.  She hadn’t felt his presence once since her decree.  Several times when she’d gone looking for him in the aether, she couldn’t find him at all.  He was gone.  Gone from London completely.  She didn’t know where he went.  She didn’t want to know.

 

There had been other Rephaim in SciLo as well, the ones she’d told Jax about.  Sometimes they were near Warden, sometimes not.  Maybe they were other scarred Rephaim.  Maybe they were hunting him.  She didn’t know.  Right now, she didn't care either.

 

She fell into a dreamless sleep.

 

* * *

“Paige.”

 

She blinked her eyes, staring into Warden’s apple gold irises.  

 

“I have the antidote,” he said.

 

She pushed herself into a sitting position.  She could see that the sky outside was turning pink with dawn.  

 

He held out two vials of brackish looking liquid.  “If he can drink it, that’s best,” Warden said.  “If not, an artery, not a vein. One vial and one spare, in case there is an accident.”

 

Paige nodded and took the vials.  She left without looking back.  Or saying 'thank you'.

 

* * *

Paige could hear the screaming before she even opened the door.  The den was in chaos.  The gang had moved Nick from the kitchen down into the cellar, near a concrete drain in the floor.  Everyone looked exhausted, even Jax.

 

“I have it,” Paige said, looking down at Nick.  He was insensible, moaning and screeching, his muscles alternating between contracting so violently she was afraid he was going to break a bone and going totally limp.  Eliza held his head in her lap, trying to prevent him from slamming it against the damp concrete.

 

They’d stripped Nick to his boxers.  He was covered in bruises, vomit and piss.  His voice was hoarse and cracking with every moan.

 

Jax snatched the vials out of her hand.  “What do we do with them?” he demanded, eyes wild and bloodshot.

 

She opened her mouth and just stared at him.  She shook her head sharply.  “He’s not going to be able to drink it,” she said numbly.  “Syringe.  In an artery.”

 

Nick screamed again, all of his muscles cording.  He flailed at Eliza, catching her violently across the face, nearly knocking her out.

 

“Hold him,” Jaxon snapped at Zeke.  

 

Zeke urged Eliza away and pulled Nick’s upper body into his lap, rolling him on his side.  Paige saw the injection site and retched uncontrollably.  Nick's skin was grossly distended, turning his shoulder into one giant blackened blister.  His skin was too shiny and looked strained to nearly bursting.

 

Paige watched as Jaxon took a syringe and inserted the needle into the vial with practiced ease.  She wondered again what else he was doing aside from drinking when he locked himself in his boudoir.

 

“You too, my lovely,” Jaxon said to Paige.  She followed his directions, straddling Nick’s legs.  Zeke rolled Nick all the way over onto his stomach, using his knees to pin Nick’s arms to the ground and planting his hands against Nick's hips, holding him still.   Paige grabbed Nick’s legs, pulling them apart and then pressing all her weight against his ankles, trying to hold him still.

 

Jax crouched over Nick's prone form and slapped at the inside of Nick’s thigh.  Then, with a frown, he stabbed the syringe deep into Nick's femoral artery.  Nick’s muscles corded and he fought.  Paige and Zeke managed to hold Nick still until Jaxon could completely depress the plunger.  The Jaxon, Paige and Zeke all sat back and waited.

 

The effect was nearly instantaneous.  Nick’s muscles stopped cording.  He went limp, trembling slightly.  The moaning stopped.  As they watched, the festering blister that took up most of his upper back began to slowly recede.

 

Paige reached for Nick, running her hands gently through his hair.  “Nick?”

 

He blinked up at her.  “ _Sotnos_?”  He said something else in Swedish, which she didn’t understand, but she took for a good sign.  He did that sometimes when he had a migraine.

 

Zeke and Jax managed to get Nick back up the cellar stairs and then up to his own room.  Paige took a basin of warm water and a flannel and wiped him down from head to toe.  She tossed the soiled boxers in the rubbish and tucked him into his bed.  

 

She lay down next to him and quickly fell asleep.

  
  


END CHAPTER


	10. The Company of Monsters

It was twilight when Paige awoke.  Her rest, though lengthy, hadn’t been particularly restorative.  She was disoriented, agitated.  Zeke was shaking her shoulder gently, his dark eyes soft and searching.

 

“It’s okay, Paige,” he said gently.  “I can take over.”

 

She looked at Nick, who was sound asleep.  He looked better.  Terrible, but better.  There were dark smudges under his eyes and numerous scrapes and bruises visible on his skin.  

 

“How is he?” she whispered to Zeke.

 

“Stronger,” he said.  “He just needs rest.”

 

Paige understood in that moment that she was intruding.  It was Zeke’s place, not hers, to keep watch through the night.  

 

Unable to look at Zeke, Paige pushed herself out of the bed.  She leaned over and pressed a gentle kiss to Nick’s forehead before leaving the room.

 

In her own room, she stretched.  She was exhausted, but not tired.  Her heart hurt.  Her spirit hurt.  She grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.

 

* * *

Warden rose to stand as she entered the sanctuary.  There were several oil lamps burning in the space, allowing her to see him clearly.  He was dressed as he was earlier, in black from head to toe.  “How is Dr. Nygard?” he asked.

 

Paige just stared at him and shook her head.  “He’ll live,” she said tightly.  

 

She stared at Warden, shaking all over.

 

 _“Paige_ ,” he said warily, taking a step toward her.

 

“How - “ she demanded, her entire body trembling with rage.  “ _Why_ \- “  She stared at him, at a loss for words.  She growled and ran at him, shoving him as hard as she could with both of her outstretched hands.  It had virtually no effect on him.

 

“You sick fuck!” she yelled.  “Why would you do that?  Why would you invent a drug like that?”

 

“Paige,” he said quietly, trying to capture her elbows.

 

She swung her arms from side to side, throwing him off.  “I’ll kill you,” she yelled.  “I’ll kill you.  You twisted bastard.”  She leaned into him, beating against his chest as hard as she could, scratching and punching and clawing.  “ _Why_?” she yelled.  “ _Why_?”  She screamed until she was hoarse.  She flailed at him until she could barely lift her arms.

 

She finally pushed away from him, her chest heaving, tears and sweat streaming down her face.  She stumbled backwards and would have fallen, but he caught her, pulling her close.  She pushed at him half-heartedly, but did not fight as he lifted her into his arms.  He walked across the sanctuary and sat down in the chair with her body cradled to his chest.

 

She wept real tears, crying like she hadn’t cried since Finn died.  Crying like a lost soul, an orphan, an outcast.  Warden remained silent, his arms around her.

 

She was exhausted, defeated to her very core.  Nick would live.  But at what cost?  If this is what Scion intended to do to them, how could they ever possibly hope to fight back?  Flux wasn’t just lethal, it destroyed the voyant.  It destroyed the people who cared for the voyant.  The syndicate was in no way prepared for it, and they had no intention of becoming prepared.  They were fucked.  Every last one of them.  Scion was going to burn the syndicate to the ground.

 

She lay there, against Warden, for hours, consciousness flitting in and out of sleep.  It was dim and chilly inside the abandoned church.  She was aware of him snagging a blanket off the bed and wrapping it around them both.  He was so warm.  She’d forgotten that, somehow.  She pressed her fingers against his chest.  She could feel the barest tingle.  She wanted to touch him.  She didn’t give a shit if it was forbidden.  And she didn’t give a shit if he pretended he wasn’t into it.  She understood that tonight, of all nights, he wasn’t going to argue with her or set limits.

 

She unbuttoned his waistcoat and then his shirt, aware of the way his breath caught.  Was he worried she was going to stab him?  It was a thought.  But she hadn’t brought her knife.  It was sitting on her bed, back at the den.

 

She slid her palm against his chest.  All of her senses tingled, like she’d just plunged headlong off her dreamscape and into the aether.  She hated him.  She hated him so much.  He was a monster.  And yet ...

 

Paige couldn’t remember the last time she felt safe.  But she felt safe now.  How fucked up was that?  He could kill her.  He told her he’d planned as much just a few short months ago.  He was part of a conspiracy that made her very existence into a crime.  And yet, she felt safe.  Was she such a monster that she could only feel safe in the shelter of more monstrous creatures?  Jax couldn’t make her feel safe.  Not anymore.  But Warden could.  It was so twisted.

 

Warden’s hand covered hers, pressing her palm against his chest, holding it there.  She looked up at him.  The lamps had burned low and there wasn’t much light, but she could make out his features, the soft glow of his irises.  His gaze flickered between her eyes and her lip.  She sucked on her bottom lip and then winced, stopping.  It still hurt.  His eyes held a question that he wasn’t going to ask.

 

“Jax,” she said quietly, looking away.  “I sort of ... slammed him into a wall.  I was upset.  He wasn’t impressed.”

 

Warden didn’t reply, but his silence was damming.  She’d done far worse than slam Warden into a wall only a few hours earlier and he hadn’t responded by hitting her so hard she bled.  He admitted he’d planned to hurt her, but he hadn’t ever _actually_ hurt her.  Unlike Jaxon, who professed how much he did to protect her, and then left her bleeding and vulnerable.  

 

“Where have you been?” Paige asked quietly.  “I know you’ve left SciLo a few times.”

 

Warden shifted in the chair, gathering her closer.  “In the human vernacular, I am re-evaluating my life choices.”

 

Paige chuckled bitterly.  “Well,” she said.  “It’s good to know I’m such a disaster that I can incite a mid-life crisis in an immortal.”

 

He tipped her, forcing her head back, making her meet his gaze.  His lips pursed together tightly.  “ _You_ are not a disaster,” he said firmly.  “ _I_ was.  You merely illuminated the condition.”

 

She remained silent, studying his features.  She’d missed him, she realized.  She still felt any number of hostile emotions toward him, but she couldn’t deny that she had missed him.  And she liked his face.  Even if she occasionally wanted to punch it in.  He was sinfully handsome, especially for a monster.  She wondered if it made it easier for him to hunt.  Probably.  That wasn’t a particularly heartwarming thought.

 

“So what does that mean?” she asked.  “‘ _Re-evaluating your life choices_ ’?”

 

“I spent many years intent on revenge,” he said quietly.  He sounded old, tired..  “To the exclusion of all else.  When it became apparent that following through with my plans wasn’t ...”

 

 _When he decided not to kill me_ , Paige thought.   _When he touched me._

 

He sighed.  “I was adrift.  But I cannot remain idle any longer.  Destroying Jaxon Hall in the way he destroyed me is not an option.  But it does not mean I cannot find purpose.  The Sargas are my true enemies, not Jaxon Hall.  It is time I concentrate on ridding this world of the plague of Sargas.”

 

“I thought they banished you,” Paige said, tucking her head against his chest.  When he’d told her that, weeks ago, she had the distinct impression that the Sargas family set the rules, not him.  She had no idea of ridding this world of their plague could entail.  “What are you planning?”

 

“Nothing yet,” he said wearily.  “I am making inquiries, forays.”

 

She looked up at him.  “Into what?”

 

“Rephaite culture, primarily,” he said, frowning.

 

Paige shifted.  She had to remove her hand from his chest, trying to ignore the sense of loss she felt.  She sat up taller, facing him.  “You said they branded you a traitor.”

 

“They did,” he said wryly.  Beneath the blankets, his right hand found hers, grasping it loosely.  “But if I prostrate myself sufficiently, I am confident they will take me back.  Nashira needs me.  Or someone _like_ me.  And as far as I know, she would prefer it actually be me.”

 

Paige bristled all over, thinking of Warden’s back, thinking of how much he said Nashira wanted a dreamwalker.  Nashira needed someone _like Warden_ , but she would prefer Warden himself.  Paige had a bit of compassion for that position.  She wouldn’t want a pretender either.  But she still resented it.  Nashira didn’t deserve him.  “You’re going back to her?”

 

“I am not a dreamwalker, Paige,” he said.  “It is significantly easier for me to kill someone if I am in close physical proximity.”

 

She couldn’t fault that logic, but she frowned.  “What _are_ you?” she asked.  “You said that the Rephaim are clairvoyant.  Are you like humans, do you have different gifts, or are you all the same?”

 

“It is comparable to human clairvoyance,” he said.  “Aside from Nashira, a Rephaite has a single gift, a single route to the aether.  Just like voyants.”

 

“So what’s yours?” she pressed.

 

He smiled mirthlessly.  “I am what Jaxon Hall classifies an oneiromancer.”

 

Paige’s brows arched.  “A sleep-dealer?  That’s a theoretical categorization.”  A gift even more rare than her own, even if he couldn’t directly affect the aether.  She was impressed.

 

“Not so theoretical,” he said.  “I can use dreams to access a subject’s memories, or weave them together to create delusions.”

 

Paige immediately thought back to the time she had slept here, next to him.  Was he sorting through her memories?

 

“Unlike you, dreamwalker,” he said, answering her unspoken question.  “I need my numa.  Salvia.  In order to induce memory dreams.  And I have not had any for a very long time.  Your dreams and memories are safe from me.”

 

Salvia?  Paige had never even heard of that.  It sounded like some stinking herb deaf Margie would have hanging in her stall at the Garden.  Paige wasn’t going to mention that to him.  As much as it must wound him not to be able to use his gifts, she’d had quite enough of him intruding in the secret parts of her life.  She didn’t want him rooting around in her memories as well.

 

“So you’re going back to Nashira,” Paige said, fighting to keep her tone casual.  “Back to Oxford?”

 

He shrugged, giving Paige the impression that _yes_ , that was the ultimate plan.  He just didn’t particularly care for it.  Not that she blamed him.

 

“Is that where your name comes from?” she asked.  “From the penal colony?  Were you the warden?  Is that why she needs you?”

 

He shook his head.  “Warden is my ceremonial title,” he said.  “It far predates Sheol I.  It predates most of human history.  I am Arcturus, Warden of the Mesarthim.”

 

Paige blinked at him.  “That’s a mouthful.   _Arcturus_.”

 

“Indeed, Paige Mahoney, the Pale Dreamer, mollisher of I-4, it is.”

 

“ _Touche_.”  She shifted, pulling the blanket closer around them both.  “So what, exactly, are you foraying into?”

 

He pursed his lips together.  “In your terms, I burned many bridges when I left.  They are in dire need of repair.  And reconnaissance is never wasted.”

 

No doubt.  He’d reconned himself right into the middle of her most vulnerable moments.  Amazing what time and attention could accomplish.  “Recon into what?”

 

“A creature such as Nashira Sargas cannot help but accumulate enemies,” he said quietly.  “I mean to find them.”

 

She nodded.  “The enemy of my enemy and such?  You sound like Jax.”

 

“Jaxon Hall is quite adept at his machinations,” Warden said, looking down at her.  “I may have learned a thing or two while watching him.”

 

“Now that’s a slippery slope,” Paige said.

 

“Indeed,” Warden said frowning.

 

With a sigh, Paige twisted, pushing the blanket away and standing next to his chair.  Her right hand was twined with his and she didn’t release it.  He sat there, waiting.  Waiting for what, she wasn’t entirely sure.  For some indication of her wishes, probably.  She stared across the sanctuary at the cracked plaster walls.  It was late.  The wee hours of the morning.  There were still hours before sunrise.

 

“Did you ever love her?” Paige asked quietly.

 

“Nashira?” Warden asked.  She turned to look at him.  His lips curled in disgust.  “No.  Never.  Her claim on me was a punishment, the imposition of her will on one who had displeased her.”

 

“But she wants you,” Paige said.

 

“Yes,” he said carefully.  “Just as she wants a dreamwalker.  And a world to rule.  Nashira Sargas’s wants know no bounds.  My desires have nothing to do with them.”

 

She looked down at him.  “If they did,” she said.  “What would you desire?”

 

“Her death,” he said flatly, holding Paige’s gaze.

 

She nodded.  “Anything else?”

 

His gaze slid from hers to their clasped hands.  “Another slippery slope, Paige Mahoney.  I seem to have no shortage of them.”

 

She squeezed his hand until he met her gaze again.  “In all your re-evaluation, you might want to consider what it is you actually want.”

 

He took a deep breath and leaned forward in his chair.  He pulled Paige close, urging her to stand between his splayed knees.  His hands went to her hips, pulling her closer, though he did not paw or fondle.  He was so much taller than she that even seated, he was nearly her height.  Paige’s hands instinctively went to his shoulders, resting there awkwardly, unsure of what to do.

 

He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the center of her chest.  Had it been anyone other than Warden, Paige would have thought it was a cheap ploy to touch her tits.  But despite the undeniable intimacy of his actions, it wasn’t terribly sexual.  His left palm rested against her abdomen.

 

Paige had no idea what he was doing, but she understood that it was important.  It had meaning.  It was an answer to her question about what he wanted.  She just wasn’t sure what the answer meant.

 

Her fingers slid up his shoulders to his neck and then into his thick locks.  Her breath puffed raggedly against his hair.  She could feel a low growl in his chest and the way his fingertips tightened at her right hip.

 

“What is this?” she asked, her voice a bare whisper.

 

“A concession,” he said quietly.  “To all of the things I desire, but cannot have.”

 

She shook her head, pushing against him.  She forced him to sit back and then straddled him in the chair.  She was still on her knees, so she was scant inches taller than him.  His hands circled her waist and he looked up at her.

 

“What can’t you have?” she asked.  She felt hot and cold all over, her flesh tingling everywhere he touched.  Her breath was shallow and ragged.  She wanted him, just as she had wanted him that night in the club.  There was belonging between them.  There had been for months, whether either of them had admitted it or not.  “What are you so afraid of?”

 

His fingers flexed at her waist and she could feel him warring with himself.  “Even this much contact between a Rephaite and a human is forbidden,” he said, his jaw tight.  “To consort with a human is a flesh-crime.  It is among the most dire of our crimes.  And it is punishable by far more than death.  For both of us.”

 

Paige looked down at him and then around the deserted sanctuary.  “Who's going to punish us?” she asked.  “Who's going to know?”  She couldn’t believe she had the nerve to speak this way to him, but she couldn’t stop herself.  This is what was between them.  This heavy, trembling desire.  He could occasionally pretend that he was above such concerns, but it was a lie.  He wanted her.  She could feel it in her bones.  He could see her, the _real_ her.  And he wanted her with a desire that was nearly crushing him.

 

“ _Arcturus_.”

 

Paige didn’t have any time to react as Warden was out of the chair, grabbing her upper arms and shoving her behind him as he faced the stairs.  She grasped the back of his shirt waistcoat to keep from falling and was only then aware of the sound of someone ascending the steps into the sanctuary.

 

She tried to glance around Warden, but he moved, blocking her view and his hand clamped down hard on her arm in a clear warning.

 

“Arcturus,” the voice said again.  It was female.  Her tones were clipped, precise, with just a hint of something that suggested that English wasn’t her native tongue.

 

“Terebell,” he said, inclining his head.  

 

Paige chanced another glance around him and saw the woman.  Well, not a woman.  A Rephaite.  There was no doubt about that.  Like Warden, she was incredibly tall and dressed all in black, though her clothes harkened to another time.  She was beautiful, in a completely terrifying way.  Her skin had more of a metallic sheen than Warden’s and her dark hair framed her face like a hood.  She did not look pleased.

 

There was another set of feet on the stairs and Terebell was soon joined by another Rephaite, this one male.  He was taller than Terebell, but shorter than Warden with nut brown skin and dark, curling hair.  He looked very unpleasant.

 

“Alsafi,” Warden said.

 

It was at this point that Paige remembered she had unbuttoned Warden’s waistcoat and shirt.

 

“Is that ... _human_?” Alsafi asked, his disgust at the idea clear in his voice.

 

“This is not Sheol I,” Warden replied, his voice echoing the same glacier-cold tones as Alsafi.  “I do not have the leisure of sending for one of Graffias’s toys in order to fight off the necrotic bite of an Emite.  I am forced to be considerably more _creative_ as an outcast.”  

 

Alsafi opened his mouth to reply, but Terebell silenced him with a motion of her hand.  “Indeed,” she said.  “Regrettable though it is.”

 

Paige opened her mouth to reply and Warden squeezed her arm again, hard.  She knew what he was afraid of.  He’d just told her.  Flesh crimes.  Consorting with a human.  If they’d been caught in the act, they could both be killed.  And she had thought he was being overly dramatic.

 

She knew the situation looked incriminating, even though it hadn’t been.  Not really.  Flesh crime implied some flesh was involved.  And very little had been.  

 

Warden was backpedaling out of the compromising situation as fast as he could, trying to save both their asses.  Still, Paige was getting pretty pissed off.  She was used to being maligned for being a voyant.  But to be treated like dirt for being _human_?  Terebell and Alsafi could go fuck themselves.

 

Terebell walked farther into the sanctuary.  “Nashira must not find out,” she said coldly.  “Not if you intend to resume your position as blood-consort.  She may speculate on how you stayed alive all these years apart, but she can never know how low you stooped.”

 

“Of course,” Warden said evenly.  Paige clawed at his hand.

 

“Why is it still alive?” Alsafi demanded.  “Be done with it.”

 

Warden pulled Paige around in front of him so quickly that she had to scramble on tiptoe to stop herself being dragged.  She stood there, still dangling from Warden’s grip.  Alsafi stared at her like she was a bug, but Terebell’s eyes went wide.

 

“A ... _dreamwalker_ ,” she said quietly.  Her gaze cut from Paige to Warden.

 

“Untrained,” Warden said.  “But yes.  It would appear so.  Young and malleable as well.”

 

“Well,” Terebell said quietly.  “That is very ... _creative_.”

 

“Nashira has been searching for a dreamwalker for decades,” Alsafi said, narrowing his gaze at Paige.

 

“Yes, thank you, Alsafi,” Terebell said coldly, her dismissal evident.  She looked at Warden.  “I brought you amaranth.  This will be the last of it.  I suggest you make your reparations with Nashira soon.”

 

He nodded, holding out a hand for the vials she provided.  She dropped them into his palm, her gaze locked on Paige the whole time.

 

“Do be careful, Arcturus,” Terebell said.  “You know how deceptive appearances can be.”

 

Paige had no idea what Terebell was talking about.  Was she supposed to be deceptive, or her relationship with Warden.  She had no idea what the giant was getting at.

 

END CHAPTER


	11. Shit Relationships

“Those were two of my closest allies,” Warden said quietly.  It felt like a challenge, sitting there between them.  

 

He and Paige were walking side by side down the darkened street, heading toward the den.  It wasn’t the wisest move with NVD patrols all over the cohort, but Paige wanted to finish their conversation from earlier.  Especially in light of the interruption.

 

“Please understand what I mean when I say consorting is forbidden,” he said.

 

Paige was still stinging from her very recent run-in with Terebell and Alsafi.  Dealing with Jaxon on a daily basis, she thought she was accustomed to megalomania, but those two were pieces of work.  If those were the good guys, Paige prayed she never met the Sargas.  “Your closest allies are a couple of assholes,” she spat.

 

“They are Rephaim,” Warden said.  As if that was an answer.  Though Paige figured maybe it was.  Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell her.

 

“Are all of you like that?” she demanded, glancing over her shoulder at him.  “You all really think that humans are just disgusting annoyances that you have to put up with so you don’t starve to death?”

 

“I am not like that, Paige,” Warden said, frowning at her.  “But you are correct in your assessment of most Rephaim.  Especially the Sargas and their allies.”

 

“And they would rather see you dead than with someone like me,” she said quietly.  It was starting to rain.  Of course it was.

 

“Oh, most assuredly,” Warden said tightly.  “My death, or allowing me to shame the entire Race of Rephaim?  They would not hesitate to put me to death, nor would they mourn me after I was gone.”

 

Paige swallowed thickly.  Great.  Good to know.  Warden was valuable so long as he didn’t degrade himself with a human.  “And what would they do to me?”

 

“I believe we’ve already established that Nashira wants to murder you, steal your gifts and force you to do her bidding for eternity.  Let’s assume that’s the best you could hope for,” he said, his gaze boring into hers.  “I don’t believe it would be productive to enumerate the many other tortures that could be devised to punish a human who dared to become involved with a Rephaite.”

 

“I fucking hate all of you,” Paige said, stalking ahead.

 

“An understandable response, even if it is shortsighted.”

 

She turned around and nearly snarled at him.  “What the fuck is it with you?” she demanded. “You want me, or you don’t want me?”

 

“What _I_ want,” he said, putting his face very close to hers, “is for you to not labor under any false illusions about what, exactly, it means for me to be a Rephaite.  We are not human, Paige.  We are a pox on your world, though most Rephaim choose to see it the other way, that you are a pox on us.”

 

“Oh, yeah, no, I got that,” Paige assured him acerbically.  “I particularly liked it when you paraded me around like a present for your ex.  All you needed was a big red bow.”

 

He frowned.  “It is regrettable that Terebell and Alsafi saw you.”

 

“Yeah, now you can’t lie about me,” she snapped.

 

“Oh, I can still lie about you,” he said darkly.  “As long as I draw breath, I suspect I will be lying about you.  If you have an ounce of self-preservation, you will lie too.”

 

She stared at him, angry and confused.  “Lying about what?” she asked.  “Lying about how you feel about me?  About how I feel about you?  Feelings are forbidden too as well as touching?”

 

He looked away.  “Yes,” he said quietly.

 

She shook her head.  “I don’t understand why it matters, why they should care.”

 

“It doesn’t matter _why_ ,” he said.  “Just that it does.”

 

She growled and stalked several feet away.  Warden stood his ground, watching her.

 

Paige shook her head, staring at him.  “Do you want me?” she asked, disgusted at how small her voice sounded.  “Because I truly can’t tell.  One minute you pull me close, the next you shove me away.  Now I’m self-propelled Emite antidote and a welcome home present for your girlfriend.”

 

He stared at her for so long that she didn’t think he would answer.  Then he sighed, bowing his head.  “I’ve tried to tell you.  What _I_  want doesn’t matter.  It has never mattered.  There is simply what I must do.”  

 

He looked blindly up at the sky, rain drops dotting his face for several long moments before he once again looked at her.  “One time in my eternity, I put my desires first.  I gave up on everything except the idea of revenge, and we both know how that turned out.”

 

 _With a touch,_ Paige thought.  That’s how it turned out.  With his plans all janxed to hell and another forbidden entanglement that was going to hurt someone for whom he cared.  He really was shit with relationships.

 

“I didn’t appreciate being called malleable,” Paige said, aware of how petulant she sounded.

 

Warden looked at her and smirked.  “If it is any consolation, you are not malleable.  You, Paige Mahoney, are one of the most stubborn creatures I have ever encountered.”

 

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

 

He shook his head.  “No,” he said, “I do not.  I just wish that you could occasionally do more things in your own best interest.”

 

“The same could be said for you.”

 

He merely looked at her.

 

* * *

Paige stood at the door to the den.  She and Warden had parted company several blocks ago and she just felt like shit.  Everything in her world was upside down and the last thing she needed to do was walk into more chaos.  

 

With her hand on the doorknob, she opened herself to the aether, feeling.  Everyone was home.  She could feel Eliza, busy with Pieter.  Nick and Zeke were both calm, quiet, certainly asleep.  Dani was in her lab, engrossed in something.  Jax and Nadine were ... Paige didn’t know.  And she didn’t feel like investigating too closely.

 

She decided against using the door and walked around to the alley, shimmying up the rain-slicked downspouts.  She wiggled her fingers under her window sash and threw it open enough to pull herself inside.

 

She lay there, on the floor of her room, staring up at the stars painted on her ceiling.  She was damp.  She needed to get up and change.  With a groan, she forced herself up.  She lay her damp clothes across the armchair and threw on nightclothes.  She needed to brush her teeth.

 

Opening her door the barest crack, she looked out into the hallway.  It was dark and quiet.  Slowly, she slipped through the door, inching her way toward the bathroom, trying to avoid the creaky floorboards.

 

Unexpectedly, the door to Jax’s boudoir opened.  Paige plastered herself back against the wall, as if that could possibly do any good.  Jax was fully sighted.  If he so much as glanced in her direction, he would know she was there.

 

But it wasn’t Jax standing at the door, it was Nadine and she - thankfully - wasn’t looking into the hallway.  She was standing there with her hand on the doorknob, looking over her shoulder at Jax.  

 

“Now, now, moppet,” she heard Jax say.

 

Nadine let go of the doorknob and turned around to face Jax.  With her heel, she pushed the door shut, but it didn’t catch all the way.

 

Paige stood there in the hallway, rooted to the spot.  Part of her would rather die a thousand deaths than have to witness Jax and Nadine - god, she couldn’t even finish the thought.  But another part of her was so damn curious, she couldn’t move.

 

She crept closer, peering through the tiny crack between the door and the frame.  Jax was sitting on the chaise in shirt sleeves, which was weird.  Paige had lived at the den for years and she’d only seen Jax’s arms once.  They looked like you’d expect a binder’s arms to look, deeply scarred with the names of his boundlings.  He was pale and thin, verging on gaunt, with a wiry body.  He looked deceptively small.  Paige knew better than most just how strong he was physically, though right now he didn’t look like he could hurt a fly.  He looked old, far older than he was, frail even.

 

Nadine was standing in front of his desk, chewing on her bottom lip as she looked at him.  She looked young, really young.  And Nadine _was_ young, though Paige tended to forget it given what a cunt the hisser was.  But right now, Nadine looked like a lost child.

 

Jax was saying something, Paige couldn’t make out the words.  But she didn’t need to.  The look on Jax’s face was more than enough.  Whatever he was saying was wrapping Nadine all the more tightly around his bony fingers.

 

As far as compromising situations went, the one playing out in Jax’s boudoir was far more incriminating, in Paige’s view, than the bit of heavy breathing and hand holding she and Warden had shared earlier.  Whatever was going on between Jax and Nadine was ... _wrong_.  And not just wrong like gross - though it was that.  

 

Standing there, watching them, Paige really didn’t get the sense that there was anything physical going on between the pair.  Or at least not sexual.  She gave a fleeting thought to the fact that Warden might not be able to differentiate this type of poisoned intimacy from a physical relationship.   _Shit at relationships.  He was absolutely shit at relationships_.  Paige set that aside.  She didn’t have time to ponder how ill that boded for their entanglement.

 

What Paige did understand, watching Jax and Nadine, was that Nadine was vulnerable and Jax was preying on it.  Gleefully.  Paige knew Jax didn’t believe in evil.  It was probably what allowed him to sleep at night.  Not that it looked like he’d been doing much of that lately.

 

Shaking her head, she pushed away from the door.  She was too busy trying to rescue herself.  She couldn’t rescue Nadine too.  And she didn’t think Nadine would appreciate her trying.

 

* * *

“Jax and Nadine are not fucking,” Paige said without bothering to look up from the bills she was tucking into her shoe.

 

“I never said they were.”

 

She glared up at Warden.  He was dressed in black again, his hooded coat pulled up, shadowing most of his features.

 

“Go away,” she snapped.  “I’ll be leaving in a few.”

 

She quickly finished closing up the booth, locking it.  It had been a long day and she was going to have to hustle to get back to the den before the NVD patrols started.  She ducked into the tunnel, aware that he was shadowing her.

 

“What I questioned,” he said quietly, “is why Jaxon Hall broke a time honored tradition of mime-lords and mollishers with you.”

 

She glanced over her shoulder.  “And my answer is the same: it’s Jax, who the fuck knows.  He’s just not wired that way.”

 

“He cultivates secret relationships, even within his Seals.  It would behoove you to wonder why.”

 

Paige turned the corner and headed for Floral street.  “If I stopped to wonder why Jaxon Hall does all the things he does, I would go insane.”

 

Warden fell into step with her and stopped as they reached the busier street, putting out his gloved hand to stop her as well.  He hailed a buck cab.  “Jaxon Hall amasses allies.  You could use some as well.”

 

They climbed into the cab.  “I thought that’s what you were,” she said under her breath.

 

He shrugged.  She didn't know what that was supposed to mean.  She listened as he directed the cabbie to Betterton Street.  She couldn’t afford the detour by Warden’s place.  Jax would want his money.

 

* * *

“I can’t stay long,” Paige said, stepping up into the sanctuary, pulling her cravat loose.  

 

He simply looked at her, but made no reply.  “I told you I am making inquiries,” he said.

 

“Yeah,” Paige replied, crossing the sanctuary to sit on his bed.  “Looking for Nashira’s enemies.  Good luck”

 

He nodded, watching her carefully.  “I do not ask this lightly,” he said.  “But I want you to meet with some of them.”

 

“No. Way.”  She said, leaning back, propping her hands against the mattress, narrowing her gaze at him.  “I met a couple of your friends yesterday.  I’m good.  For ... _ever_.”

 

Warden frowned, removing his hood.  His hair was in disarray, falling unevenly across his forehead.  But he looked ... _good_.  Like ... _shiny_.  He was almost luminous, both physically and his aura.  Paige looked away.  They’d done this yesterday and nothing good had come of it.

 

“This meeting is not with my friends,” Warden said quietly.

 

She arched an eyebrow, tapping one booted foot against the floor.  It was the boot with the money in it.  The money she needed to get to Jax, probably so he could buy some more goddamn absinthe.  What the hell was Warden getting at?  “So who’s the meeting with?”

 

“Someone by the name of Rackham,” Warden replied tightly.

 

“Who is he?” Paige asked, already knowing she didn’t want the answer.  Rackham was a human name.

 

Warden took a deep breath and released it slowly.  “He is part of the Archon.”

 

Paige shot off the bed like she’d been electrocuted.  “You want me to meet with someone from fucking _Scion_?”

 

He sighed.

 

“Oh no,” she yelled.  “Don’t you fucking sigh at me.  First you have me questioning every damn thing my mime-lord does, then you introduce me to some of your friends who seemed pretty keen on killing me just for existing, and now you want me to meet with someone from the fucking _Archon_?  Are you insane?”

 

“Gomesia and Nashira believe they have complete control of Scion, but they are blind,” he said.  “Their rule chafes and many in the Archon are not particularly scared of either the Sargas or the Emim.   There are parties within Scion who are actively working against the Sargas.  They could be valuable allies.”

  


“They probably could.  But you know what they do to people like me?  Best case scenario, they send me to the Tower to be tortured before they gas me with NiteKind.  Worst, they publically  hang me on ScionNet for entertainment.  You’re all shiny now.  Why don’t you go meet with this Rackham person?”

 

“I am a Rephaite,” he said. “I suspect from Rackham’s perspective, I am indistinguishable from the Sargas.”

 

“Oh, that’s _so_ sad,” Paige snapped.  “I wouldn’t have any idea what it’s like for Scion to make snap judgements about my character based on what I am.”  She stopped and smiled, all teeth, just like Jax.  “Oh, no wait, _I do know_ what that’s like.  And you know what else?  I’m not just a voyant, I’m a fucking _syndie_.  I commit mime-crime every day that I draw breath.  Fuck you and fuck Rackham.  Have a nice meeting.”

 

“Are you finished?” he asked dryly.  “Or is there another barrage of sarcasm forthcoming?”

 

With a growl, she headed for the stairs.  Warden caught her as she walked past, his gloved hand grasping her upper arm.

 

“Get off me,” she snarled, pushing at him.

 

He didn’t let her go, he turned her to face him, both of his hands grasping her upper arms.  It didn’t hurt, but she couldn’t move and she was on her tiptoes, fighting for balance.

 

“This is not a game, Paige,” Warden said earnestly, his face close to hers.  “Scion’s RDT is coming and you know Jaxon Hall and the Unnatural Assembly are not going to do a damn thing about it.  Nashira has heard rumors of a dreamwalker within the SciLo syndicate.  She is the one pushing for additional voyant detection measures.  She wants the syndicate.  She wants _you_.”

 

“And you want me to side with Scion against her?” Paige yelled.  “How?  They murder people like me.”

 

His expression fell and he slowly lowered her back to her flat feet and then released her arms.  “I cannot stand by and watch them take you, Paige.”

 

“Yeah, well, I’m not real crazy about that idea either,” she said, rubbing her arms where Warden had held her.  She looked at his hands, at the gloves.  “Those are new,” she said quietly.  “You can’t even touch me now?”

 

He looked down at his hands and then curled them into fists, shoving them into his coat pockets.  “The gloves are Nashira’s decree,” he said quietly.

 

Paige nodded, willing her eyes not to fill with tears.  She sure as hell wasn’t going to cry in front of him.  Not again.  “It looks like getting back in Nashira’s good graces is agreeing with you,” she said, feeling like an idiot.

 

He looked at her, brow furrowed.

 

“You look ... good,” she said awkwardly.  How did people make conversation like this?  “Better.”

 

He nodded.  “Amaranth,” he said.  “It heals spiritual wounds.”

 

She looked up at him.  “It healed your ‘giest scars?”

 

“Not permanently,” he said.  “But it has greatly alleviated the pain.  Terebell will not be able to get me anymore, unfortunately.”

 

Paige nodded.  Slowly, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a small waxed-canvas pouch.  She handed it to him.  “Here,” she said, “I got this for you.”

 

He took it, his gaze searching her face.

 

“It’s salvia,” she said.  “Look, send me the meet-up information.  I’ll think about it.  If I can get away.”  With that, she turned and headed down the stairs.

 

END CHAPTER


	12. On A Cold Novembertide Evening

 Novembertide of 2058 was different from all its predecessors in Paige’s life.  It was the first Novembertide that she hadn’t spent with her father, at least since they moved to London eleven years earlier.  She was incredibly busy, Jax had her running from one fire to the next all month.  And her father was immersed in some gargantuan project for SciSORS.  Paige hadn’t asked for details.  She didn’t want to know.  

 

It felt normal to break with tradition, in some way, part of the natural parting from her childhood.  However, so many parts of her were broken at the moment, that it didn’t feel like growth. Paige stared around the dingy den at Jax, who was drunk off his ass, and Zeke and Nadine, who found the idea of Novembertide to be a fairly novel concept, feeling a bit hollow.

 

“Come now, my mollisher,” Jax crooned, “have some spiced rum.  Let’s make the best of this tedious farce of a holiday.”

 

Paige took the cup from him, but immediately set it on the sidetable as he staggered back to his chair.  She’d studiously avoided alcohol since that disastrous night at the flash house.  And if she decided to take up drinking again, she wasn’t going to do it with Jax.  

 

Jaxon was in a particularly vicious mood.  Paige had heard all of his ranting against Novembertide before, and it hadn’t been particularly interesting the first ten times.  She knew Jax’s assessment, that holidays, in general, were some idiotic human attempt to stave off death.  Thinking back to the spiced beef that her grandmother used to make for St. Steven’s day, Paige couldn’t say she felt there was a whole lot of mortality avoidance that went into the recipe.  But there was no arguing with Jax, especially when he was drunk.  

 

Novembertide, specifically among Scion-approved holidays, bore the brunt of Jaxon’s holiday rage.  A farce, a travesty, the cheapest and most vulgar way to try and pander to the hearts and minds of pre-scion England, was what he called it when he was feeling particularly effusive.  A giant crock of festering shit is what he called it when he was feeling less loquacious.  

 

Paige didn’t necessarily disagree with him.  Novembertide was a ham fisted attempt to remove religion from daily life.  Paige certainly didn’t miss religion, and all of the crushing oppression and guilt that accompanied it, if Jaxon’s contraband history books were to be believed.  But she didn’t feel like a holiday celebrating Scion was an improvement.  The most cynical part of her wondered if anyone in SciLo actually celebrated the holiday as it was intended.  She doubted it.  Even her father, upstanding Scion denizen that he was, had a tiny little evergreen fern that he would decorate mid-December.  Scion could impose all the rules they wanted, the human hearts still found a way around.  

 

Except for Jaxon’s.  He didn’t have a heart.

 

Paige stood up and reached for her coat and a heavy woolen scarf.  

 

“What’s this?” Jaxon demanded, staring at her, gesturing with the hand that still held a mostly-full tumbler of rum.

 

“Work,” she said flatly.  “You know, _the reason that I wasn’t able to go spend the holiday with my father_.”

 

“ _Bah_ ,” Jaxon replied, waving her away.  “I’ve done you a favor, my Paige.  Truly.”

 

“Oh, I’m sure,” Paige said under her breath, turning to the door.  

 

The weather outside was shit.  It was cold and rainy and gray.  There was hardly any traffic at all and not a single SVD patrol in sight.  She headed for the market, tucking her scarf tightly around her neck.

 

* * *

Paige took a deep breath as she stepped out of the tunnel that led to the dark market, closing the mirrored door behind herself.  She jogged up the steps and out through the second hand clothing store and into the early evening air.  The trip had been lucrative.  Petja, a trader from Bratislava, who was only in SciLo every quarter, had taken their entire backlog.  Three of Pieter’s works, two of Rachels and four of Philippe’s.  There was also an odd assortment of funerary art.  It would be enough to keep the den going through the new year.

 

The fact that it was a useful task should have made Paige feel better, but it didn’t.  Not really.  She just felt ... _adrift_.  It was hardly a new sensation.  She was becoming somewhat inured to it.  But tonight, of all nights, it hurt.

 

She should head back to the den.  Or even to Chat’s, which would be doing a lively holiday business.  Instead she hailed one of the few rickshaws and headed for Betterton street.

 

* * *

Warden was there when she arrived.  She’d known he was in SciLo, she sensed him while scouting earlier.  He rose to stand as she entered the sanctuary.

 

“I thought you would be with your father,” he said.

 

“Yeah,” she replied flatly, “so did I.  Jax and Scion had other plans.”

 

He motioned for her to sit on the bed, which she did gladly.  She kicked off her boots, shrugged out of her jacket and lay down on the bed in a lump.  She could feel him looking at her, but she just couldn’t muster the effort to interact with him.

 

Paige dozed for a long while.  She loved that space between waking and walking.  She could float there forever.  But eventually she rolled over, staring up at the shadowed rafters overhead.  “I wasn’t sure you’d be alone,” she said.  “I felt another Rephaite mind, near the Arch.”

 

He moved from his chair to sit on the bed next to her.  “Gomeisa,” he said darkly.  “He is dangerous.  You would do well to avoid attracting his attention.”

 

She looked up at him.  “He’s a Sargas, right?  Nashira’s ... brother, or something?”

 

“Something like that,” Warden said with a nod.  “Gomeisa is the other blood-sovereign.  He spends most of his time at the Westminster Archon, overseeing Scion.”

 

Paige frowned.  How was that possible?  How could a Rephaite be so involved in Scion and all of SciLo was oblivious?  Granted, even in her scanning, she rarely ventured near the Arch.  Why bother looking for trouble?  She rolled onto her side, toward him.

 

“I got the contact information,” she said, looking at him.  He nodded.  “Lupita Mertens.”  

 

“Presumably one of Rackham’s conspirators,” he said.

 

“We hope,” Paige said dryly.  “I had Dani do some poking around.  Mertens works for Scion, but she’s an accountant or something.  Nothing to do with SciSORS.  No connections to anyone named Rackham.  My father has more clearance.”

 

“To most organizations, there is a hierarchy,” Warden said.  “Nashira does not deign to meet with every NVD officer.  Presumably Rackham has similar arrangements.  Certain contacts are more expendable than others.”

 

“Yeah,” Paige said dully, “I know.”  The syndicate operated exactly the same way.  Many mime-lords and mime-queens were reclusive, with faces known only to their most trusted emissaries.  Jaxon didn’t make public appearances if he could avoid it.  It was much easier to send her, or Nadine or Eliza.

 

“So you will meet with Ms. Mertens then?” Warden asked.

 

“I’m still thinking about it,” Paige said sourly.  She knew Warden had a point.  But in the interest of not searching out trouble, Paige was reticent.  If Jaxon found out, he would be livid.  And if Scion found out, Paige could be strung up at the Tower.  Neither option was particularly appealing.

 

Silence hung in the air for long minutes.  Paige listened to the sound of rain falling on the decaying roof.

 

“Thank you,” Warden said softly, “for locating my numen.”

 

She looked at him in the dim light of his oil lamps.  She remembered the time she had referred to him as her numen.  That night felt like it was a million years ago.  “You’re welcome,” she said.  “Have you used it?”

 

He shook his head, frowning.  “Not yet.”

 

He wasn’t going to ask, she knew that.  Taking a deep breath, she said, “Do you want to?”

 

He looked at her, his expression unreadable.  “Very much,” he said quietly.

 

She looked away.  “What would you get out of looking at my memories that you don’t already know?” she asked.  “You watched Jaxon for years.  You watched me.  You already know my most humiliating moment.”  She looked at him, her heart beating in her ears.

 

He canted his head to the side, narrowing his eyes.  Slowly, he shook his head.  “I know only my experience, my perception of those moments,” he said.  “Memory is something far different.  Sacred.   _Your_ experience of _your_ memories is yours alone, completely separate from mine.  Unique.”

 

She felt agitated, hot all over.  “But what would you get out of it?” she demanded, looking away.

 

“Knowing you,” he said calmly, “through my gift, my route to the aether.”

 

She looked at him.  “Fine,” she said.  “But I want to know you.  Through my route to the aether.  I want to see your dreamscape.”

 

The edges of his mouth quirked up.  “Have you ever done that before?  Entered another’s dreamscape?”

 

“No,” she admitted, “but Jax thinks I can.  He thinks I could - “  She stopped, swallowing thickly.  “He thinks I could use it to ... invade another person’s dreamscape.”

 

He stared at her, his expression unreadable.  “Do you wish to hurt me, Paige Mahoney?”

 

 _“No_ ,” She said, sitting up, facing him, alarmed that he could think such a thing.  “No,” she said again.  “I just - “  Why was she even asking for this?  She’d had one abysmal try at entering someone else’s - Jax’s - dreamscape.  It had terrified her.  And it hadn’t worked.  She took a deep breath, searching for the reason.  She looked at him.  “I think that you’re strong enough that I won’t hurt you accidentally.”

 

He nodded.  “So in return for your memories, you will see my dreamscape.”

 

“Can I choose the memory?” she asked.

 

“To a certain extent,” he said.  “It requires a strong memory.  The more visceral, the easier it is for me to access it.”

 

She laughed mirthlessly.  She had no shortage of visceral memories.  “Fine,” she said.  “Let’s do this.”

 

* * *

Paige blinked, rolling onto her side.  The taste of the salvia tea was still bitter in her mouth.  That stuff was incredibly foul.  It was still dark, still night as she pushed herself up onto her elbows, the memory of meeting and then being reunited with Nick fresh in her mind.  She felt shaken, fragile.  “Why those memories?” she asked.

 

“Dr. Nygard serves as a strong focal point,” he said quietly.  “A strong undercurrent to some of your most poignant memories, the poltergeist attack that springboarded your voyant capabilities, confirmation that you were not alone, that you belonged.  Even your meeting with Jaxon Hall.  All of those memories speak to your need to belong, to love and be loved, to trust.”

 

She sighed and laid back down on the bed, facing toward Warden, but not looking at him.

 

“You love him very much,” he said.

 

“Yeah,” Paige replied quietly.  She did.  She loved Nick beyond logic.  He was her best friend, her partner, her protector, her constant companion.  For a while, she had thought he could be more.  But even with romance off the table, he was still vital to her as breathing.

 

She looked at him.  He was studying her, his brow furrowed, like she was some puzzle he couldn’t solve.  “What?”

 

He shook his head, frowning.  “It is odd,” he said.  “That it should be so ... difficult.”

 

She rolled onto her back, watching him.  “What is difficult?”

 

He looked away, brow furrowed again.  “Your attachment to Dr. Nygard is completely reasonable.  He has been a light along your path.  He cares for you deeply and truly.  He would protect you from anyone who meant you harm, even Jaxon Hall.”  He sighed.  “I understand why you love him.”

 

“But it’s difficult?” Paige asked, confused.

 

He looked at her.  “It is a difficult experience for me,” he admitted quietly.  “I trust Dr. Nygard’s intentions and yet I am ... “

 

Paige watched as he searched.  Searched for what, she wasn’t certain.  Understanding, perhaps.  Maybe even words.  While he professed to find the English language amusing, it wasn’t his native tongue.  Maybe there was some concept in glossolalia that didn’t translate to English.

 

“You are?” she prompted.

 

He frowned again.  “ _Jealous_ ,” he said quietly, clearly uncomfortable with the word.  Or maybe more than the word.  Maybe he was uncomfortable with the sensation.

 

“You’re jealous?” she said, sitting up, facing him.  “Of Nick?”

 

He shrugged, looking lost.  “Apparently, yes.”

 

She shook her head, feeling more confused than ever.  “Nick’s in love with Zeke, you know,” she said, looking at him.

 

“Yes,” he said quietly.  “I know.  And yet, you still love him.”

 

“And you’re busy trying to get into your ex’s good graces,” she pressed, frowning.

 

“Indeed,” he said, looking away.

 

She looked at him and an awareness dawned.  “Emotions don’t always make sense, you know.”

 

“I know,” he said sourly.

 

She smiled at him.  “But yours usually do, don’t they?  You’re probably always on the righteous path.”

 

He frowned at her.  “It does seem that since meeting you, there is considerably more gray area to my ethics and emotions.”

 

She laughed, a joyous, childlike laugh.  Her body shook with it and she buried her face in the covers.  When she could finally catch her breath, she rolled over and looked at him.  “We’re so fucked.”

  
END CHAPTER


	13. Newest of Years

“How was your father?” Nick asked.

 

Paige looked over at him and shrugged.  “Good, I guess.”  Paige never had any idea what to say about her father.  Or to him.  They’d missed Novembertide thanks to Jaxon’s scheduling.  Between her father’s job and her illicit criminal activities, it was the first week of the new year before they were able to make time.  She’d gone to his flat last night after she finished errands for Jax.  It had been too late for dinner, so they’d had breakfast a few short hours earlier.  “He wants me to think about going to USL.”

 

Nick raised an eyebrow.

 

“I know,” Paige said wearily.  “He’s just .... not satisfied with me.  He never will be.”

 

Nick pulled her close and gave her a tight squeeze.  “He just cares about you, sotnos.”

 

“Yeah,” she said.  She supposed it was true.  She loved her father.  She just didn’t have much of anything to say to him.  Simply discussing her daily life was incriminating.

 

“So I take it Jax thinks you’re staying the weekend at your father’s place?”

 

“I stayed there last night,” Paige said, eyes darting around the coffee shop.  They were nowhere near the central cohort.  There wasn’t much chance of being noticed.  Still, it paid to be mindful.

 

“And tonight you’ll be in an abandoned church on Betterton?” he pressed, eyebrows raised again.

 

She gave him a sour look.  “Trust me, it isn’t anywhere near as salacious as it sounds.  He won’t even touch me without gloves anymore.”

 

Nick winced on her behalf.  “I’m not sure that sounds _less_ salacious, but I don’t think I want details.”

 

Paige frowned.  She knew that Nick thought Warden was some kind of twisted rebound after their night in the rooftop garden.  Maybe he was right.  Though she didn’t really think so.  Warden was many, many things.  But a rebound wasn’t one of them.

 

“So he still wants you to meet with someone?”

 

Paige nodded.  “Yeah.”  She’d had to tell Nick something, so he’d gotten a very abbreviated version of events wherein Warden knew of, and did not trust, Jaxon.  In all honesty, Warden could pick a number and get in the queue.  

 

She told Nick that Warden was encouraging her to make contacts outside of the syndicate.  Nick wasn’t happy and he’d threatened to tell Jax, but so far she’d been able to back him down.  She had also failed to mention the fact that Warden wasn’t human, or that the Rephaim even existed.  She couldn’t bear for Nick to look at her like she was insane.

 

“This is a bad idea, sotnos,” Nick said.  “If Jaxon finds out he’ll  - “  Nick left it hanging there, in the air.

 

“Yeah,” Paige said quietly.  “I know.”  And she did know.  Jaxon’s rage, if he found out, would be incandescent.  She would find herself not only not a mollisher, but in all probability, wanted by the entire SciLo syndicate with a hefty reward on her head.

  
  


* * *

Paige dropped her backpack next to the bed and sat down.  Warden wasn’t home.  She glanced around the church.  It looked more abandoned than usual.  There was a layer of dust on the small table next to his chair.  He’d been gone, a lot.  

 

She supposed that was a good sign.  Nashira was open to the idea of him returning to the fold.  Except that Paige didn’t feel like this was a good thing.  She accepted that it was necessary, she just hated it.

 

It was freezing in the church.  Paige shrugged out of her jacket and kicked off her boots, slipping between the heavy covers of Warden’s bed.  It took several minutes, but she was slowly warming up.

 

She must have fallen asleep.  The next thing she was aware of was Warden walking up the steps.  It was twilight outside and she could see his shape outlined against one of the in-tact windows.  He walked to the bed and knelt next to it.

 

“Good evening, Paige Mahoney,” he said.

 

She looked at his apple green irises, glowing faintly in the dim light.  She smiled.  He was so weird.  She suspected the overt formality was a Rephaite thing, though she wasn’t willing to spend enough time with other Rephaim to get a bigger sample size.  What a race of tight-asses.  “S’up, Arcturus?”

 

He smiled at her, shaking his head.  He turned and sat on the bed next to her, his hip close to hers.  “Your mime-lord believes you to be with your father?”

 

“Yes,” she said.  “That’s my hope.  It is Jax, so you never know.  He’s still drinking a lot, so we’re probably fine.”

 

He nodded, looking down at her.  “I am pleased that you are here,” he said quietly.

 

She took a deep breath.  “In the church?” she asked.  She wet her lips, “Or in your bed?”

 

“ _Yes_.”

 

Fuck.  They couldn’t keep doing this, torturing themselves.  “I thought maybe you would be tired of sharing,” Paige said carefully.  “Aren’t you shacked up with Nashira back at Scheol I.”  She tried to sound cosmopolitan and off-hand about it.

 

He frowned down at her.  She watched as he stood and took off his jacket, draping it across his chair before he removed his boots.  He urged her to scoot over and then slid between the covers next to her.  “No, Paige,” he said, turning his head on the pillow to face her.  “I am not _shacked up_ with Nashira.  We live in separate residences.”

 

Paige wanted to be irritated at him, but it was difficult with him so close.  She’d missed him.  Putting her hurt aside, she scooted toward him, pressing herself against him.  He gathered her closer.

 

“Your friends aren’t going to walk in on us again, are they?” she asked, her voice slightly muffled against his chest.

 

“Not tonight,” he said with finality.

 

Paige couldn’t prevent the tingle of anticipation that traveled down her spine.  God, this was hopeless.  They couldn't keep doing this.  She just couldn’t make herself stop.

 

He shifted, sitting half up and rolling toward her.  She lay back, head on the pillows.  He leaned over her, his upper body slanted across hers, looking down at her, his weight supported on his elbows.

 

She blinked up at him and then reached up, touching his face lightly.  His eyes fluttered shut and he pressed into her touch.

 

Her hands became bolder.  Her fingertips threaded into his hair, her thumbs traced his high cheekbones.  He turned his head, pushing his face against her right hand, the one without the ‘giest scar.  He pressed a gentle kiss against the center of her palm.  She shivered.

 

“This is dangerous,” Paige said quietly.

 

He looked down at her.  Leaning forward, he nuzzled against her jaw.  “Hubris,” he said quietly, sounding very tired.  “I drastically underestimated how much being close to Nashira again would erode my sanity.”

 

She swallowed thickly.  “So this is insanity?”

 

He laughed silently, she could feel it against her jaw.  “It is,” he said.  “It is also me attempting to regain my sanity.  I find I need you, Paige Mahoney, in ways I could never have anticipated.”

 

She turned her head and he captured her lips in a gentle kiss.  She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t think.  All these months of push and pull and here he was, kissing her, holding her.  He nipped gently at her lips and she sighed into his mouth.

 

He nipped at her bottom lip and she smiled, pulling him closer.  He deepened the kiss, his tongue tangling with hers as her fingers threaded through his hair.  After long minutes, he pulled away from her mouth, pressing hard kisses to her jaw and then her neck.

 

“I never imagined,” he said between kisses.

 

She blinked up at the darkness, trying to parse his words.  It was difficult.  He was kissing her neck.   _“Imagined?_ ”

 

He laughed, something she could feel more than hear.  “I never imagined how alive you could make me feel, dreamer.”

 

She smiled in the darkness, biting down on her bottom lip as her hands explored him, tunneling through his hair, down to his nape, the shape of his neck and shoulders. He shifted, abetting her attempts to unbutton his shirt.

 

He had to break off the kiss to completely shrug out of the material and then he was back in her arms.  Together, they dispensed with her shirt as well.  She wore a camisole beneath, aged and paper thin.  She drew him close, reveling in the feel of his bare flesh pressed to hers.  He was so warm, so vital.  Her fingers played over his back -

 

Paige froze.

 

Warden stopped as well, staring down at her, his breath coming in short puffs.  “Paige?”

 

“Your back,” she said, sitting up, forcing him to roll onto his side next to her.  In the darkness, she scrambled out from under the covers.  

 

“ _Paige_ ,” Warden said again, plaintively, his hand reaching for her.

 

She shrugged off his touch and hopped out of bed.  She pulled open the drawer on the little table next to his chair, extracting matches and lighting the oil lamp.  It cast a gentle, warm light that barely extended to the bed.

 

He looked at her, his lips pursed into a tight frown.  She crossed her arms over her chest, looking at him for long moments.  Walking back to the bed, she urged him to roll onto his stomach, which he did begrudgingly.  She stared at his back, her hand coming up to cover her mouth.

 

His scars had been bad the first time she saw them.  Now they were -   She fought back tears and bile.

 

Having had enough of the show and tell, he rolled onto his side and pulled her into the bed, under the covers with him.  He lay down, gathering her close, though she remained stiff in his arms.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

 

He was silent for a long time and she was afraid he wasn’t going to answer.  “Because it changes nothing about what I must do or what I must endure.”

 

Paige was incredibly upset, at a loss for words in the face of his resignation.  “She - “  she stammered.  “She - “

 

“Tortured me,” Warden said flatly.  “Nashira is a vicious and sadistic creature.  It was not unexpected.”

 

Paige sat up and shoved him as hard as she could in the shoulder, not that it made much difference.  “Unexpected?” she yelled.  “It was pretty fucking unexpected by me.  You’re her betrothed.”

 

He looked at her, his brow creased with confusion.  He smiled softly and she had the distinct impression she was being humored.

 

“Oh, don’t fucking say it,” she snapped.  “You’re Rephaim.  I know.  But that is seriously fucked up.”

 

He shrugged.  “I do not disagree with your assessment and yet, it is what it is.  Nashira would not have taken me back without a thorough display of penance.”

 

Paige shook her head, completely at a loss.  She was so angry, so hurt, so pained on his behalf.  And yet he never mentioned to her that Nashira had resumed her torture.  And if she hadn’t pushed the issue, he wouldn’t have mentioned it tonight either.  All he’d said was that he needed her, Paige, to regain his sanity.  What the fuck was she getting into?  

 

“How can you go along with this?” she asked, feeling so lost.

 

He took a deep breath, obviously weighing his words.  “It is what must be done,” he said.  She opened her mouth to protest and he cut her off.  “Does your mime-lord never inflict punishment while proclaiming he does so in order to protect his Seals?”

 

Paige’s mouth hung open, but she had no response.  Jaxon did dole out punishment while saying it was in everyone’s best interest.  She didn’t like it.  But she had never protested.  She’d never thought to protest.

 

“The Sargas family respects power and brutality,” he said.  “Submitting myself is the only hope I have of getting close to them, my only hope of stopping them.”

 

She looked down at him and realized there was nothing she could say.  Nothing she could do to change things.  He was right.  And her being upset about it wouldn’t make it any easier on him.  She hated this, hated it more than she’d ever hated anything.  She was uncomfortable with her own vulnerability, but she was forced to deal with it.  Having to deal with _his_ vulnerability, _his_ pain, was another matter entirely.  How could it hurt so much?

 

Slowly, she lay down again, scooting close to him.  He watched her in silence, his expression unreadable.  

 

“I despise Nashira with a depth I never dreamed existed,” he said quietly, his jaw tight.  “Every breath she takes is repulsive to me.”

 

Paige reached out and touched her fingers gently to his jaw.

 

“It is easy, when I am near her, to forget who I am, to remember only that I must fight, but not _why_ I must fight, to forget myself in the hatred.”  He took a breath.  “You remind me, Paige.  You remind me why Nashira must be stopped.”

 

Paige looked at him for a long time.  “She wants me,” she said quietly.

 

He took her hand, pressing it against his cheek and looked deep in her eyes.  “I will do everything in my power to keep you from her.”

 

* * *

They lay there together for a long time, dozing, kissing, touching.  As dawn approached, Paige sat up, staring at the pinkening sky.  “You still think that someone inside the Archon means to fight Nashira?”

 

“I do,” he said, still laying on the pillows, staring up at her.  “Now more than ever.  She means to extend her reach, to install additional penal colonies on the continent.  Her greed will draw more to our cause.”

 

“And you think that Rackham is the key?” she asked skeptically.

 

“I think it is worth discovering,” he said tightly, “but I am worried.  I do not ask this of you lightly.  And I am having second thoughts myself.”

 

Paige arched an eyebrow in question.

 

He sighed, frowning.  “I have spoken to you previously of my wonder at human ingenuity.”

 

“Yes,” she said warily.  He hadn’t ever said it like it was a good thing.

 

“It appears that SciSORS is making some incredible leaps in understanding voyancy.”

 

“Yeah,” Paige said bitterly.  “Flux, RDT, Senshield.”

 

“Oh, it is more than that,” Warden said.  “Some of it abetted by Rephaim knowledge, but some of it is entirely of their own creation.”

 

Paige stared down at him, aghast.  What more could possibly be coming their way?  “Like what?”

 

He shook his head.  “Nashira calls it a marvel,” he said.  “And it is impressive, though I do not think she fully appreciates the degree to which they are coming to understand voyants, and by extension, the Rephaim.”

 

“How so?”

 

“Temporary voyancy, for one,” Warden said with a small frown.  At Paige’s expression, he continued.  “SciSORS have stumbled across a way to induce temporary voyance in amaurotics.”

 

Paige’s eyes went wide.  “Why the hell would they want to do that?”

 

“Indeed,” Warden said.  “Why?”

 

Paige just blinked, staring blindly across the sanctuary.  That made no sense.  SciSORS goal was to cure, or at the very least, prevent, voyancy.  They weren’t supposed to be creating it in amaurotics.  She shook her head.  “How would they even do that?”

 

“Fairly simply,” Warden said.  “It merely requires the consumption of Rephaite blood.”

 

Paige stared at him, mouth agape.

 

“It is temporary,” he said.  “And, of course, it requires Rephaite blood, which we are not particularly prone to giving up.  Not without a fight.”

 

Paige shook her head again.  “So how do they - “

 

“How, indeed,” Warden said.  “I do not know.  But I do wonder.  Nashira pats them on the head for their advances, like idiot pets taught a new trick.  She underestimates them.”

 

Paige stared across the sanctuary again.  Holy shit.  Maybe the Arch did have it in for Nashira.  Paige still wasn’t convinced that was a good thing for voyants, but getting the Sargas family out of the picture had to be a good thing.  Didn’t it?  “Maybe they really can help us,” she said.

 

“Perhaps,” Warden said tightly.  “But they may prove to be as dangerous as Nashira.”

 

She smiled down at him.  “I’ll be careful,” she said.

 

He did not return her smile.

 

 

END CHAPTER


	14. Revelation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware that the overall rating on this story changed from Teen to Explicit with this chapter. You have been warned.

Paige looked at herself in the mirror and frowned.  As far as disguises went, this wasn’t the greatest one ever devised.  Hopefully it would suffice.  She had straightened her normally curly hair so it just brushed the tops of her shoulders.  A spray-on temporary hair dye made her locks strawberry blonde rather than their usual pale gold and she wore a dark hat with a wide brim.  Heavy mascara and kohl and a light pink lipstick changed her features, though she doubted she would fool anyone who knew her well.

 

With a shake of her head, she left the coffee shop bathroom.  Warden was waiting just outside and he fell into step behind her as she headed out the doors and toward the plaza.  The upscale shopping district was a far cry from both I-4 and the Arch and as such, should be suitably neutral ground.  He stayed close, though he would fall back before she met with her contact.  He’d been glued to her side since the previous evening and she knew without asking that he was uneasy.  She kept waiting for him to try and back out of this plan.

 

“How, exactly, did you find out about SciSORS inducing voyancy?” Paige asked quietly, knowing he could hear her over the din of traffic.

 

“They showed us.”

 

She turned and looked at him.  He was dressed much as he was the night they met, in exquisitely tailored clothes.  In the gray daylight sun, his skin was less luminous, more ordinary.  He was still incredibly tall, but his ever changing eyes were hidden behind dark glasses.  He could pass as human.  “They showed you?” she repeated.  “Who showed you, and where?”

 

“The heads of SciSORS R&D divisions,” he said matter of factly, “when we met with Weaver.”

 

Paige stopped walking and looked at him. “You met with Frank Weaver at the Westminster Archon?”

 

He smiled tightly and put his gloved hand on her shoulder, directing her to keep walking.  “I have met with every Grand Inquisitor since Palmerston,” he said quietly.  “Simply part of the arrangement.  I am the blood-consort of the Sargas sovereign.”

 

Paige swallowed thickly and concentrated on where she was walking.  She _knew_.  She did.  She knew, in incredibly vague terms, that Warden was immortal, ageless, timeless.  He’d told her about 1859 in first hand terms.  He’d told her that his ceremonial title pre-dated most of human history.  But none of it had felt particularly real, or relevant, until right now.  She suddenly felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of what they were doing.

 

Warden slowed as they approached the large open-air market, teeming with Sunday afternoon crowds.  Paige marveled at the differences between this market and the ones she frequented.  Here people did business freely and proudly in well constructed, permanent booths.  Heaters warded off the chill.  The wares were superb quality, many imported.  But she was amused at the occasional similarities to the black markets.  She couldn’t help but notice as vendors carefully took items from behind their counters and displayed them for wealthy patrons.  Illegal, contraband items.

 

The booth was exactly where the contact had stated, on the far corner of the market, near the exits.  It specialized in rugs and scarves, imported from the Middle East and southeast Asia.  The scarves and rugs were displayed prominently, creating many barriers and secret spaces.

 

“Eva?”

 

Paige turned and looked at the young woman.  She was tall and thin with skin like polished ebony and close cropped hair.  “Ms. Mertens?” she said in her best English accent.

 

Lupita looked at her.  “We were surprised when you contacted us.”

 

“Trust me,” Paige said, “not as surprised as me.”

 

Lupita frowned, not understanding.  “We should retreat to a location that’s a bit less public.”

 

Paige didn’t like the idea, but what choice did she have?  And it was true, the scarves and rugs created blind spots, but the market was very public.  She waved her hand.  “Lead on.”

 

Lupita headed for the market exit.  Paige followed at a good distance.  She could feel Warden behind her, though he was not close.  She really had to reach out with her senses to get any hint of him.

 

For several blocks, Paige trailed Lupita.  She eventually ducked into a watch repair shop.  The windows were filled with dusty relics.  As she entered the store, she saw Lupita slip behind the counter and pass through a curtain. Paige instinctively reached for her revolver, making sure it was handy as she followed.

 

The back room was empty, but the door on the far side stood open.  Paige followed.  There was a hallway and then another hallway, which finally opened out into a large storage space, several stories high, piled high with crates and random junk.  Paige could sense a dreamscape nearby, but it kept ... _flickering_.

 

Creeping around the crates, she found Lupita, standing there with a young man.  Paige drew her revolver.

 

“You won’t need that,” Lupita said shortly.  She turned to the man.  “This is my colleague, David.”

 

David was the source of the flickering dreamscape.  Paige stared at him, confounded.  He was slightly taller than she, sturdily built with a broad torso and long arms.  His dark hair was in need of cutting, curling messily around his face and ears.  He had an oracle’s dreamscape, though it was not stable.  She’d never felt anything like it.  But what most caught her attention were his eyes.  They were two different colors, one dark and sighted, in the voyant sense, the other a light hazel, unsighted and unfocused, possibly blind in every sense.  

 

In a moment of painful clarity, she realized what was wrong.  “So, is this Rackham’s doing or Scion’s?” Paige asked acerbically.  “I knew that Scion could induce temporary voyancy, but I had no idea they were scrapping voyants together from spare parts like Frankenstein’s monster.”

 

David laughed, his sighted eye watering.  “Where’d some syndie find a copy of Frankenstein?”

 

“Oh, I don’t need to be a syndie to know you’re using powers that don’t belong to you,” Paige replied, gripping the revolver tighter.

 

David didn’t reply, he just stood there, watching her, looking slightly amused.

 

There was a sound and Lupita’s head jerked to the side as she covered her ear with her finger, presumably listening to a hidden earpiece.  Her eyes locked onto Paige.  “She brought one of them with her.”

 

Before Paige could process what was happening, one of the crates near her head splintered as a bullet tore through it.  She ducked, firing a round in the general direction of Lupita and David as she rolled for cover.  There was a shooter, somewhere high, though she couldn’t pinpoint where.  She could hear pounding strides retreating in the distance.  She waited, reaching out with all her senses, but she found nothing, except Warden, who was advancing down the hallway.

 

“They’re gone,” Paige said quietly.

 

Warden walked to where she was crouched, offering her a gloved hand.  She took it, allowing him to pull her to her feet.

 

He frowned, grabbing her chin and tilting her head.  She became aware of a burning on her cheek, probably shrapnel from the destroyed crate.  He produced a handkerchief from somewhere and pressed it to her cheek.

 

She and Warden found the route David, Lupita and their third conspirator used to retreat, but they were long gone.  They followed the winding hallways, which eventually opened out into a loading dock in an alley six blocks from the market.

  
  


* * *

Paige and Warden ended up having to walk for nearly half an hour before they could find a buck cab.  Then it was another half an hour before they reached Betterton Street.  They didn’t speak at all.

 

They entered the sanctuary and Warden pointed Paige toward the bed as he went to his armoire.  She took a seat, feeling utterly defeated.  Her feet were killing her.  She unlaced her boots and kicked them away.

 

Where had Rackham found an oracle?  Paige had never heard of the NVD having any higher level voyants in their ranks.  And Rackham’s associates not only found an oracle, but they implanted one of the oracle’s eyes into an amaurotic.  If this was the group that could rid England of the Rephaim, Paige wasn’t sure she wanted any part of it.

 

Warden found what he was looking for and crossed the room, kneeling before her as she sat on the bed.  He removed his gloves and opened the small first aid kit, carefully cleaning the wound on her cheek.  His forehead was creased and he was frowning.  Paige could feel how upset he was.

 

He gently pressed steristrips over the cut, still looking displeased.  “It may not scar,” he said tightly.

 

Paige looked at him, their faces were so close, he was kneeling between her thighs.  She reached out and pressed the tips of her fingers to his chest.  “Warden, they _made a voyant_ ,” she said, only vaguely aware that she was shaking.

 

His eyes narrowed slightly and he gave a tiny nod.  “I know,” he said.  He shook his head, looking away.  “The harvest for the Bone Season is less than two months away.  Perhaps Rackham intends to infiltrate it.”

 

Paige slammed the palms of her hands against his chest.  “They _cut up a voyant_ , Warden!  Cut them to pieces and stuck them _in an amaurotic_!”

 

She pulled her arms back to hit him again and he captured her wrists in his hands, pulling her close.  “I know!” he yelled, staring directly into her face.  His features were twisted, anguished.  He released her wrists.  “I know,” he said more softly.  “Paige, I know.”

 

She laughed, a tittering, hysterical sound.  “Those are supposed to be _the good guys_ , Warden.”

 

He bowed his head, his gloved hands resting on her thighs.  “We do not know the circumstances of how it came to be.”

 

“Does it matter?” she demanded.

 

He looked at her and she was stuck by just how ancient his gaze was.  “It may,” was all he said.

 

She shook her head, exhaling and staring up at the ceiling.  She sat there for long minutes, aware of him kneeling between her legs, of his hands on her thighs, of the pain lashing through both their dreamscapes.  “They didn’t like you,” she finally said.

 

“So I gathered,” he replied.  “Though for a human, blanket distrust of the Rephaim is generally a prudent course of action.”

 

She lowered her head and met his gaze.  “Are you saying I’m imprudent?”

 

He did not blink.  “Without a doubt, _yes_ ,” he said in heartfelt tones.

 

She opened her mouth to make a smart ass reply, but he moved toward her, capturing her lips with his.  She gasped, but quickly twined her arms around his neck, holding him close.  This is what she had wanted last night, until she saw his scars.  Try as she might, she had never quite managed to avoid imagining his life in Sheol I with Nashira, wondering exactly what he had to do to ingratiate himself to the Sargas.  She hated it.  She hated sharing him.  She hated not knowing how to comfort him.

 

His hand pressed against the small of her back, urging her closer to the edge of the bed as he deepened the kiss.  She opened to him, her mouth and her body.  Her tongue tangled with his and she breathed him in, feeling the aether all around.  Her inner thighs pressed against his hips as she tried to draw him closer.  He obliged, grinding his pelvis against hers as his fingers threaded through her hair.  She gasped.  She could feel him, hard against her.  She could feel his hunger and her own, fueled in some part by the need to connect, to belong, after the horrors they just discovered.

 

With clumsy fingers, she unbuttoned his waistcoat and shirt, pushing them back off his shoulders.  He tugged at the hem of her shirt, watching her, his mouth pressed to her temple. She shimmied, allowing him to tug the garment over her head, leaving her in just a padded bra - part of the disguise, for all the use it had been.  

 

His fingers traced along the satin edge of the cups, his brow furrowed.  “Is this common?” he asked, looking up and meeting her gaze.

 

 _Oh, god_.  “A bra?” she asked, confused.  He wasn’t human, but he had been here for at least two hundred years.

 

He frowned.  “No, I understand that you wear undergarments, I mean,” he tugged at the padded cup, “this.”

 

“It’s supposed to enhance my assets,” she said wryly.  His lips were pink.  From her lipstick.  It was probably smeared all over her face.  She grabbed her crumpled shirt and wiped her lips and then his.

 

He was still frowning.  “Why would you need enhancement?” he asked seriously.

 

She smiled and leaned forward, kissing him again.  He kissed her deeply, growling in his chest as his fingers found the clasps of her bra and nimbly released them.  He pulled it down her arms and then tossed it away, pulling her chest flush against his.

 

She broke off the kiss, shivering at the delight of his naked skin pressed to hers.  He kissed along her neck, her jaw, his fingers skimming along her sides.  They stayed like that for a long time, kissing, touching, but it wasn’t enough.  She wanted more.  She wanted what she had gone looking for that night, months ago, in the flash house, when she found him.  

 

She broke off the kiss and scooted back on the mattress.  He stayed where he was, kneeling next to the bed, watching her.  Slowly, she released the line of buttons on her trousers, keeping her gaze locked with his.  She watched his throat work as he swallowed.  Hooking her thumbs under the waist of her trousers and underwear, she inched them slowly down, over her hips.

 

He raised his hand toward her and then stopped.  He swallowed again.  Then he carefully grasped the leg of her trousers and pulled at the material, skimming it down her legs.  Once the garments were pooled around her ankles, she kicked them away and stared at him, painfully aware of the fact that she was nude and he wasn’t.  He looked at her the way she would expect a man lost in the desert to look at a glass of water.  She could feel how much he wanted her.

 

“ _Paige_ ,” he said quietly.

 

“Scion wants me dead,” she said.  “Nashira wants to murder me for my gifts.  Rackham cuts up voyants and puts them in amaurotics.  I know this is a bad idea.  I know there are consequences.  But I don’t want to die without ever knowing this.”  She swallowed, her expression softening.  “Do you really think anyone else is ever going to look at me the way you do?”

 

He pursed his lips together and she knew he wanted to argue with her, probably to convince her that anyone with the sense to recognize her worth would look at her the way he did.  But he was lying to both of them if he thought that was true.

 

She held out her hand and he took it, allowing her to pull him onto the bed next to her.  He gathered her close, running his hands over her naked body as they kissed.  She reached for the waistband of his trousers.  Without breaking the kiss, he helped her unfasten them and pushed the material down his hips and then off onto the floor.  Their legs twined together and Paige could feel him, hard against her thigh.

 

She didn’t have much experience with human males, but Warden looked and felt the way she imagined he would.  Which wasn’t to say that the entire experience wasn’t slightly terrifying.  But she wanted this.  She wanted him.

 

She traced her fingers over his chest, down stomach.  He kissed her lips, her jaw, across her collarbone.  Slowly, she moved her hand, skimming low along his belly to his rigid flesh.  She touched him lightly, her fingertips tracing the shape of him.  His kisses had stopped and he panted heavily against her neck.  

 

“Paige.”  He said her name like a prayer.

 

He rolled over onto his back, pulling her with him, hitching her up his body.  She lay there, draped across him.  His hands came up and framed her face, gently pulling her toward him.  He didn’t kiss her like she thought he would.  Instead, he pressed his forehead to hers.  Much like the night when he had knelt before her with his forehead pressed to her chest.  She understood that this was important, that this was a ritual for him, perhaps for all Rephaim.  Even though she wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.

 

She sat there, breathing him in, feeling his dreamscape pressed so closely to hers, his aura mingling with her own.  She’d never felt anything like it, never felt such a part of anything or anyone as she did right now.  He murmured something in his own language, a series of low, soft growls that made her shiver.  Glossolalia was the language of spirits, but it was his language too.  She couldn’t understand it, but it didn’t matter.  She could understand the deference and reverence in his tone, even if the words had no form.

 

She could have stayed like that for hours, feeling their dreamscapes mingling, feeling his aura imprinting on her own.  But her body craved more.  She kissed him, hard and he responded in kind, growling deep in his chest.

 

She kissed along his jaw and his neck, biting down gently on the corded muscle.  His hands skimmed over her bare back, his fingertips digging into her hips as he moved beneath her.  One of his hands left her hip, sliding low along her stomach, then covering the wiry hair that hid her sex.  She yelped, arching into his touch and he growled in response.  Her eyes fluttered shut and she moved against his hand, desperate for more contact.

 

His fingers parted her gently, rubbing against her slick flesh.  She was breathing hard, her body slick with sweat as she moved over him.  She opened her eyes and looked down at him, shocked and emboldened by the look of naked lust on his features.  His hand kept moving, his fingers massaging her as she moved against his hand.  She was panting, saying his name.  His free hand threaded through her hair, drawing her down for a rough kiss as he rubbed her harder.

 

All at once, the building crescendo burst, her body shivering as she broke the kiss, panting with her cheek pressed to his.  She felt boneless, limp as she collapsed on top of him, only vaguely aware of his fingertips tracing along her bare back, over the swell of her backside, down her thighs.  She lifted her head and kissed him again before pushing herself up on all fours over him.  He brushed the hair back from her face and looked at her like she was something infinitely precious.

 

He would have been content to leave it there, she knew.  Well, maybe not content.  But he wouldn’t have pushed.  He never pushed.  Sometimes she had to want things enough for the both of them.

 

She pushed herself up so she was kneeling over him and she scooted lower until her knees were positioned on either side of his hips.  She sat back and looked at him, holding his gaze.  Slowly, she touched his stomach.  She could feel the muscles jump under her fingers.  Then her hand moved lower.  His hands rested on her thighs, his fingertips gently kneading as he fought to keep still.

 

Her hand closed around him and his eyes fluttered shut.  She stroked him and his fingers bit deeper into her thighs as a low growl issued from his throat.  He was hard and hot.  She released him and crawled up his body.  She pressed a hard kiss to his lips and his fingers traced along her ribs.  Reaching between their bodies, she took him in her hand, positioning him against her.  Her flesh was slick and nearly as hot as his.  She could feel his breath against her hair as he waited, his hands gone still.

 

Slowly, she pressed back onto him.  Her own body fought her, but only for a moment.  After the flicker of pain, it was easier to take him deeper.  She slid down, down, until her hips rested against his own.  Panting hard, she looked up at him.

 

His hand traced the side of her face, his thumb following the outline of her bottom lip.  He sat up, his hand against the back of her head, pulling her close for a kiss.  His sitting up changed the angle of his flesh inside her and she gasped, wrapping her arms around him.  

 

She kissed him long and hard until he pulled away, once again pressing his forehead against hers.  She held him there, her hands biting into his shoulders, feeling the weight of his dreamscape against her own.  His hands traced down her neck, down her back, to her hips.  Gently, he lifted her hips, moving her on his body.

 

She gasped, shuddering, clutching him closer.  Nothing in all her longing could have prepared her for this brutal intimacy.  There was no room to hide, no room to pull away.  She could do nothing but offer him all that she had and all that she was, and accept him in exactly the same way that he accepted her.

 

She moved now, with him.  Moving faster, harder.  His breath was coming in rough gasps and she kissed along his jaw, bit down on his earlobe.  He growled loudly, clutching her to him, sealing her hips against his own.  

 

They sat there for a long time.  Her fingers twined through the hair at the nape of his neck and his fingers played over her bare back.  She knew it wouldn’t last.  It couldn’t.  But right now, this moment was theirs.

 

END CHAPTER

**Author's Note:**

> No infringement or disrespect to the author is intended. I adore Samantha Shannon's works and this universe has had me over the moon for weeks.
> 
> However, a few notes.
> 
> 1\. I am not British. I am sure that is painfully apparent to anyone British who might read this story. I am doing my best with the language from the books, but even with that, my versions are Americanized to a certain extent. Spellings are definitely different. Other things like gas vs. petrol are different. Apologies all around.  
> 2\. In order to explore the parts of this universe that I want to explore, I am forced to make leaps. This universe is so rich and many tiny details have huge impacts, so I am sure I am going in directions that absolutely will not be canon as soon as the third book comes out. Again, apologies.  
> 3\. I don't have a beta. If anyone is interested, let me know.


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